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The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction
Knopf
November 2005
304 pages
ISBN: 0375402594
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction | Historical
From one of our most distinguished historians, a new
examination of
the vitally important years of Emancipation and
Reconstruction during
and immediately following the Civil War–a necessary
reconsideration
that emphasizes the era’s political and cultural meaning
for today’s
America.
In Forever Free, Eric Foner
overturns
numerous assumptions growing out of the traditional
understanding of
the period, which is based almost exclusively on white
sources and
shaped by (often unconscious) racism. He presents the
period as a time
of determination, especially on the part of recently
emancipated black
Americans, to put into effect the principles of equal
rights and
citizenship for all.
Drawing on a wide range of long-
neglected
documents, he places a new emphasis on the centrality of
the black
experience to an understanding of the era. We see African
Americans as
active agents in overthrowing slavery, in helping win the
Civil War,
and–even more actively–in shaping Reconstruction and
creating a legacy
long obscured and misunderstood. Foner makes clear how, by
war’s end,
freed slaves in the South built on networks of church and
family in
order to exercise their right of suffrage as well as gain
access to
education, land, and employment.
He shows us that
the birth of
the Ku Klux Klan and renewed acts of racial violence were
retaliation
for the progress made by blacks soon after the war. He
refutes
lingering misconceptions about Reconstruction, including the
attribution of its ills to corrupt African American
politicians and
“carpetbaggers,” and connects it to the movements for civil
rights and
racial justice.
Joshua Brown’s illustrated
commentary on the
era’s graphic art and photographs complements the
narrative. He offers
a unique portrait of how Americans envisioned their world
and time.
Forever Free is an essential contribution to our understanding of the
events that
fundamentally reshaped American life after the Civil War–a
persuasive
reading of history that transforms our sense of the era
from a time of
failure and despair to a threshold of hope and achievement.
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