He was incorrigibly racist, unwilling to listen to criticism and unable to work with Congress.

Once lionized as a heroic defender of the Constitution against Radical Republicans, Johnson today is viewed by historians as one of the worst presidents to occupy the White House. That task fell to his successor, Andrew Johnson. Lincoln did not live to preside over Reconstruction. Any effort to restore the rights of Southern blacks, it implied, would lead to a repeat of the alleged horrors of Reconstruction.Ī caricature of President Andrew Johnson’s 1866 veto of a bill to create the Freedmen’s Bureau. Dunning and his students at Columbia University, was popularized by the 1915 film “Birth of A Nation” and by Claude Bowers’s 1929 best-selling history, “The Tragic Era.” It provided an intellectual foundation for the system of segregation and black disenfranchisement that followed Reconstruction. This portrait, which received scholarly expression in the early-20th-century works of William A.

The heroes of the story were the self-styled Redeemers, who restored white supremacy to the South. According to this view, Radical Republicans in Congress, bent on punishing defeated Confederates, established corrupt Southern governments presided over by carpetbaggers (unscrupulous Northerners who ventured south to reap the spoils of office), scalawags (Southern whites who supported the new regimes) and freed African-Americans, unfit to exercise democratic rights. For decades, these years were widely seen as the nadir in the saga of American democracy. Reconstruction refers to the period, generally dated from 1865 to 1877, during which the nation’s laws and Constitution were rewritten to guarantee the basic rights of the former slaves, and biracial governments came to power throughout the defeated Confederacy. But that era has long been misunderstood. Issues that agitate American politics today - access to citizenship and voting rights, the relative powers of the national and state governments, the relationship between political and economic democracy, the proper response to terrorism - all of these are Reconstruction questions. This is unfortunate, for if any historical period deserves the label “relevant,” it is Reconstruction. Preoccupied with the challenges of our own time, Americans will probably devote little attention to the sesquicentennial of Reconstruction, the turbulent era that followed the conflict. Lee at Appomattox Court House, 150 years ago next month, effectively ended the Civil War.

Reconstruction by eric foner