Industrialization helped carry the news that labor and capital naturally fought. What happened to that optimistic postwar vision? During the 1870s, Richardson explains, a competing theory of political economy emerged in the northern popular press, and northerners of both parties came to fear European-style class conflict. That the freedpeople would readily adopt free labor and contribute to economic harmony was not in doubt. America's unique political economy made such cross-class mobility possible, even for African-Americans. Northern Republicans in 1865 had little doubt that upon setting the slaves free in southern society, they would overcome all temporary barriers, become "the nation's stereotypical workers," accumulate capital, and achieve self-sufficiency (pp.
"Free labor," that pervasive, unifying, yet unrealistic and vague ideology trumpeted by the Republican party, included the idea that a natural state of harmony of interests existed between labor and capital.
Demoting (but not discarding) traditional explanations-politics, racism, exhaustion, and corruption, among others-Richardson successfully injects class into the mix. Why did "the North" allow Reconstruction to die? In The Death of Reconstruction, Heather Cox Richardson combines analysis of the northern popular press with ample secondary literature to chart a change in attitude among northern Republicans between 18. Reviewed by Shep McKinley (Department of History, the University of North Carolina at Charlotte)
The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post-Civil War North, 1865-1901.Ĭambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2001.
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