A Short History of Reconstruction [Updated Edition]

by Eric Foner

It required, however, not simply the evolution of scholarship but a profound change in the nation’s politics and racial attitudes to deal the final blow to the Dunning School. If the traditional interpretation reflected, and helped to legitimize, the racial order of a society in which blacks were disenfranchised and subjected to discrimination in every aspect of their lives, Reconstruction revisionism bore the mark of the modern civil rights movement. In the 1960s, the revisionist wave broke over the field, destroying, in rapid succession, every assumption of the traditional viewpoint. First, scholars presented a drastically revised account of national politics. New works portrayed Andrew Johnson as a stubborn, racist politician incapable of responding to the unprecedented situation that confronted him as President, and acquitted the Radicals—reborn as idealistic reformers genuinely committed to black rights—of vindictive motives and the charge of being the stalking-horses of Northern capitalism.

1960s revisionism of the Reconstruction period appears to be an inverse of the Dunning School: Lincoln good, Johnson bad, Radical Republicans good, Negro involvement and contributions.