The Most Shameful Decade In Our Entire National History

Reconstruction (typically 1865-1875) is probably the least-discussed topic in American history. It’s like the drunk uncle who crashed into the side of the church, or the niece who works the pole down at the jiggle joint. It’s one of those shameful things that many would prefer to not discuss, like “Stumpy Joe” Childs of Spinal Tap choking on someone else’s vomit.


And with good reason. It was a shameful, shabby nasty episode. The headline is lifted from James Truslow Adams, a historian of the 1920s and 1930s. Charles Bowers, an Indianan who was a popular historian in the 1920s, said that the Southern people were “put to the torture chamber… never have American public men in respectable positions, directing the destiny of our nation, been so brutal, hypocritical or corrupt.” (Thanks to Dr Clyde Wilson for the quotes; my Reconstruction box is unpacked.) The Gilded Age which followed – also known as the “Progressive Age” – is much more fun. It was also funded largely by the wholesale looting of the defeated South. The Northern industrialists and banking interests did very well, thank you. Down in Dixie, its fruits included poverty that lasted nearly a century; the introduction of the sharecropper system, under which former slaves and former Confederate soldiers were reduced to debt-slaves to the “company store”; a hatred of the republican party which I wish would be recovered. The rancor between black and white began with Reconstruction, I’d argue, as the GOP did the usual “divide and conquer” to pit black against white. Blacks were elected to state legislatures – remember, former Confederates were largely disenfranchised (depends on the state) – and at the bidding of the GOP votes for higher taxes, bond issues and the like which left the South not only impoverished, but deep in debt.


Reconstruction, by Columbia professor Eric Foner, is the standard regime narrative. Foner is a Marxist, which in itself does not disqualify one from being a historian. Eugene Genovese, Christopher Lasch and Christopher Hill are brilliant historians. (Of course, Marxists can be horrible professors, like the ghoulish Eric Hobsbawm). Foner is a Marxist but with a racial slant: he’s a full-on radical egalitarian, much like the lunatic abolitionists and Radical Republicans. The subtitle of his book is something like “the unfinished revolution.” So you get the idea. His theory serves both sides of the U.S. regime: radical egalitarian/higher law crap for the Ds; the despicable Rs get to pat themselves on the back for suppressing “Southern terrorism” aka the Klan, electing blacks to office, “defending the union.” During the last bought of iconoclasm (2020), the Faux Watchers over at Instapundit, the neocon distributor of whatever their bosses in Tel Aviv tell them to distribute, brayed loudly that it was stupid to give the “losers” (that’s the Confederates) “participation trophies.” This is the view advanced by the likes of Dennis Prager at Prager U, or its somewhat more high-toned but equally vile and dishonest Claremont.


Yeah? How’s that Grand Republic of y’alls working out?


Anyway. One gets the sense in by early 1870s that many in the North were appalled by the rapacity of the looting. It also happened that the freed blacks did not turn out to be the Rousseauian (sic?) noble savages of Abolitionist imagination, and most of them fled back to Boston or Oberlin. And it was a Yale man, no less, who offered up the best account of Reconstruction: William Archibald Dunning. A native of New Jersey, he got a PhD from Columbia in 1885 and studied for a year in Germany under Helmut von Treitschke, interesting in his own right.


Dunning presented his views in a survey called Reconstruction, Political and Economic: 1865–1877. More importantly, though, he oversaw the dissertations of students who went on to produce scholarly studies of their own. Dunning and his students, or School, are now viewed as the most desperate sort of white supremacist punchable Nazis.


Dunning’s basic thesis: Reconstruction was the work of Radical Republicans who with malice and vengeance looted and sought to crush the South with bayonets wielded by carpetbaggers (Northern profiteers), scalawags (traitorous Southerners who joined them) and freedmen, who were unprepared for such sinister machinations on part of their ostensible liberators. I suggest that the facts and original sources sorta suggest that is closer to the truth of the matter than whatever’s fed into the Faux-Watcher’s brain by the jowly Prager or the fantasists of Claremont.


So I’d start with Dunning’s book: Reconstruction, Political and Economic: 1865–1877 as a broad overview; also an excellent overview (and superior to Dunning’s, truth be told) The South During Reconstruction by E. Merton Coulter, part of the History of the South series published by LSU Press. One of the first things you’ll learn is that Reconstruction was state-by-state. Some were more recalcitrant that others, depending on which gangster was placed in charge. Louisiana had it tough because the sachem there was none other than “Little Phil” Sheridan. There’s also Reconstruction: Punished with Poverty by the redoubtable Kennedy brothers of Louisiana. The best short overview is likely Southern Reconstruction, by Philip Leigh.


Walter Fleming wrote Civil War and Reconstruction in Alabama. He edited a two-volume collection of documents related to reconstruction and more than most, looked at how the freedman managed. W.E.B. Debois even said that while “anti-negro in spirit” (whatever that means) Fleming was always fair.


J. G. de Roulhac Hamilton wrote Reconstruction in North Carolina.


Charles Ramsdell wrote Reconstruction in Texas.


C. Mildred Thompson: Reconstruction in Georgia, which is first rate even though she’s a new deal Democrat and a friend of Eleanor Roosevelt (lol).


J.W. Garner covered Mississippi; J.S. Reynolds South Carolina; W.W. Davis did Florida.


Two contemporary accounts are The Southern States Since the War, by Robert Somers, an Englishman, and The Prostrate State: South Carolina Under Negro Government, by a journalist from Maine named James Pike. Dixie After the War by Myrta Avary, who grew up in Virginia during Reconstruction.


How about dat ebil Klan? The Invisible Empire by Stanley Horn, which covers the first Klan and suggests that in some cases it was necessary. (He also wrote the first good study of the Army of Tennesee.) This view is kinda supported by Washington’s KKK: The Union League, by John Chodes, which states outright that Southern whites were ready to peacefully accept emancipation but GOP/Union League fuckery ruined it.


And yes, there’s Gone With The Wind – but a much better novel about Reconstruction is And Wait For the Night by John Corrington, which shows how it happened in north Louisiana. And excellent vignettes throughout William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! 


And last, but certainly not least: a thank-you to the legendary Dr. Clyde Wilson of South Carolina, editor of John Calhoun’s papers and who has performed the labors of Hercules keeping alive Southern memory. A number of these titles I discovered via Dr. Wilson’s Essential Books series — there’s 60 Essentials on the War Between the States and 50 essentials on Reconstruction and the New South. 


Ah, if only Abe Lincoln was still alive! He would have been gentle! Nice theory. Lincoln was first and foremost a party man desiring nothing more than power. If stomping on the South was necessary for a few electoral votes, he’d have done it with gusto.


Note: most of the books mentioned are available via Archive.org. Save them on a local drive while you still can. This is samizdat, man!

This piece was originally published at A Memoir of the Occupation on Oct. 19, 2025.