violence shut down the “Reconstruction”

Book review:

Splendid Failure:

Postwar Reconstruction in the American South

by Michael W. Fitzgerald (b1956)

Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2007

234 pages

Splendid Failure offers a shockingly realistic account of the so-called “Reconstruction” period after the Civil War. There was a lot more violence, much earlier in the time frame, than you probably know about.

The violence throughout the South was not successfully resisted by Northern forces after the war, and after the presidential election dispute of 1876, the Northern watchdogs withdrew their concern. Commercial and political interests asserted their primacy in the North.

Fitzgerald observes: “At the national level the Republicans were the party of economic growth” (p. 100).

The white elites who held the economic and political power in the South before the war basically regained their economic and political power after the brief period of nominally reformative so-called “Reconstruction.”

As we now know, the war and the so-called “Emancipation Proclamation” weren’t the end of the story.

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Seeing far: Selected poems with 47 free verse and haiku poems,

and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)

and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”

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Splendid Failure: Postwar Reconstruction in the American South