Expanding the Boundaries of Reconstruction

The historiographical boundaries of Reconstruction were once clear and well accepted. For much of the twentieth century, the field, to use Bernard Weisberger's term, was a "dark and bloody ground" of starkly different interpretations.¹ William Dunning and his acolytes set the tone by declaring Reconstruction an utter failure in no small part due to the efforts of radical Republicans to treat black people similar to white people. Revisionist scholars countered by arguing that Reconstruction was, in fact, a noble effort that moved former Confederate states toward democracy. Postrevisionists, however, questioned the significance of black male voting and Republican political power since former slaveholders retained their land and former slaves continued to labor in the fields. Then, in 1988, Eric Foner published his masterful synthesis, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, which sustained the revisionist interpretation and subsequently dominated the field.

But since Foner, the clear lines of Reconstruction historiography have blurred. Although historians have added much to our understanding of the era, there has not been a significant challenge to Foner's interpretation. Part of the reason for the sustaining nature of Foner's work is that the freedom narrative still has a powerful grip on conceptualizations of American history. Another reason is that Foner helped to solidify the chronological scope of Reconstruction and its primary focus on politics and governance. While other syntheses of Reconstruction have been published in recent years, neither departs substantively from Foner's interpretation and each accepts a similar scope and focus.²

Despite this continuity of framing, historians are increasingly pressing the boundaries of Reconstruction, challenging the chronology, exploring different places, and calling into question the very meaning of the term "Reconstruction." The two books under review here are part of this shift away from the traditional framework of Reconstruction historiography. Steven E. Nash directs our attention to the mountain South, while Carolyn L. Karcher focuses on Albion Tourgée's long postwar struggle against white supremacy. Neither are large departures from the existing scholarship, but both show how the most innovative work in the postbellum era seeks to expand our conceptualization of Reconstruction.

In Reconstruction's Ragged Edge, Steven E. Nash largely adopts the traditional periodization of Reconstruction, but he shifts focus from the Deep South to Appalachia. In so doing, he reorients our perspective away from the story of how plantation districts shed slavery and instead focuses on the legacies of war's injustices, the new politics of biracialism, and the challenge of adapting to greater market integration. The twenty-one mountain counties in western North Carolina that form the basis for this illuminating and deeply researched account sat on the edge of the southern economy and at the margins of national politics. But the Civil War and Reconstruction, Nash contends, shattered "the localized world" of mountaineers, ushering in a series of new power brokers and subjecting local people to regional, national, and international transformations (p. 4).

Although the number of enslaved and free black people in western North Carolina was small, the region was closely tied to slavery. Mountain farmers produced a surplus of food and sold their excess to markets in the lower south. Mountaineers also held similarly racist views toward black people as other white southerners did elsewhere. The war, however, ruptured the local rhythms of these counties. It pulled military age men out of the region and in to Confederate service, but it also brought to the region Confederate officials who increasingly disrupted local people's lives through conscription, tax-in-kind policies, and the home guard. The outbreak of guerrilla war, with some white mountaineers fighting for the Union and others deserting from Confederate service to join the Federals, further unraveled the antebellum social...