Introduction: The Future of Reconstruction Studies

Historians of Reconstruction are currently at a crossroads. Reconstruction remains one of the most controversial—and least understood—aspects of American history, and that controversy began in the era of the Civil War itself. The genealogy of historiographic debate is familiar to anyone who has spent any time in the field: from the early competing interpretations of participant historians; to the white supremacist and anti-democratic arguments of the Dunning school and the challenge from W. E. B. Du Bois to that view; to the 1960s advent of “revisionism” followed by “post-revisionism”—both of which rejected the Dunning school but were apparently divided on the degree to which they emphasized the hopeful or dour elements of the period’s history. For all their differences of interpretation, the historiography shared many assumptions. Chief among them was that Reconstruction, if national in scope, turned on two binaries: the divide between North and South emerging from the Confederate War of Rebellion and the divide between black and white Americans emerging from the enslaved experience. Furthermore, although there was always some quibbling over the specifics of the chronology, the periodization remained relatively widely understood. Reconstruction began in 1863 with the Emancipation Proclamation or 1865 with the end of the war. It ended in 1877, with the withdrawal of the last U.S. troops from the former Confederacy.¹

The definitive statement punctuating more than a century of historiographic debate on Reconstruction appeared in 1988: Eric Foner’s magisterial Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877. It is a truism to say that Foner has dominated the field of post–Civil War studies. Foner’s narrative hinged on his analysis of two key categories: the meaning of freedom and the ideology of free labor. Although some topics remained unexplored, weaving these concepts together into one volume reflected both the key concerns of his historical actors as well as those of all historians who had interpreted Reconstruction to date. Reconstruction’s evidentiary and argumentative force thus gave—and continues to give—it incredible staying power. So effective was Foner’s synthesis of revisionist historiography, so comprehensive his summary of American political history from 1863 to 1877, so complete his demonstration of African American actors as central to the Reconstruction narrative that his interpretive judgments have become normative and default positions in college textbooks and classrooms. Reconstruction furthermore offers a useful—and useable—past to readers: its “unfinished revolution” provides a teleological framework for understanding the civil rights advances that would come a century later and a hopeful way of thinking about the potential of the American state in relation to progressive causes.

Even at the time it appeared in print, historians wondered where the field could move. Anticipating the significant influence Foner’s Reconstruction would come to hold, Michael Perman famously asked in his 1989 review, “What is left to be done?” With such a “finished” statement about the “unfinished revolution,” what else could be said? Historians have come to understand the prescience of Perman’s question. As the essays in this forum show at length, there has been a profusion of Reconstruction scholarship since 1988—and even some substantial challenges to Foner. But no synthetic overview has come to displace Reconstruction.²

Nearly thirty years later, this forum provides a number of helpful answers to Perman’s question. Nine leading scholars were asked to assess the state of the field of Reconstruction studies on significant topics—some of them as old as the field itself, some of them having emerged since Foner—African Americans, labor and capitalism, law, religion, politics, the South, the state, the West, and women. As standalone essays, they reflect some of the much-lamented atomization of the profession. But together, they also point toward several common themes that force historians to reconsider a number of common assumptions or think in new ways altogether.

Collectively, these essays call for an expansion of the boundaries of the field of Reconstruction studies and for this expansion in four ways, all of which are growing areas of inquiry in the field: wider geography, broader chronology, deepened interdisciplinarity, and fuller engagement with...