![]() ![]() He writes that:Īs black activists paid for their convictions with their lives, terrified terrified carpetbaggers-northern politicians, missionaries, and teachers-fled the South. Amidst his descriptions of the gains made by black men and women, Egerton gives the cost in lives lost and bodies mangled. The bottom line of Reconstruction was blood. ![]() Along the way, author Douglas Egerton engages with both modern scholarship and popular understanding of Reconstruction. The book’s Reconstruction is the reconstruction of race relationships from the moments the first blacks freed themselves by coming into Union lines in 1861 until Democratic terror crushed the biracial government of Wilmington, North Carolina in 1898. Less a history of the Reconstruction Era, and more the story of the conflict through which African Americans achieved revolutionary change in states where they had been enslaved only to be beaten back, sometimes literally, by the savage forces of reaction. ![]() This recent history of Reconstruction keeps its lens firmly focused on African Americans from start to finish. Egerton published by Bloomsbury Press (2014) 448 pages. ![]() The Wars of Reconstruction: The Brief, Violent History of America’s Most Progressive Era by Douglas R. ![]()
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