The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896

"Most of the books in the Oxford History of the United States series end on a triumphal note. The volume on the Revolution ends with establishing the Republic. The Civil War volume ends with emancipation and Union victory. My volume begins with the end of the Civil War, but then enters a period of great change and conflict. My volume ends in 1896, turmoil subsides but without any sort of triumphal note or any clear sense of what comes next. The Gilded Age is so relevant to read about right now because it is so similar to the period we’re in. We’re in a period of great tumult, it’s hard to say whether we’re moving forward or moving backward. When I use the phrase ‘Greater Reconstruction’ I mean that the Reconstruction efforts that followed the Civil War were not confined to the South. There also was an attempt to reconstruct the Western United States and indeed even the Northern United States. The victorious Republican Party wanted to remake the entire country into a replica of Springfield, Illinois, Abraham Lincoln ’s hometown. Reconstruction was an effort to make the United States a nation with no great differences in wealth—a largely small town and rural Protestant country, and a nation of roughly equal people. “Virtually everything about the country changed during the Gilded Age” As the victorious Republicans saw it, once we freed the slaves, once Reconstruction took place, once American farmers settled on the land Native Americans previously occupied, everybody in the United States would be roughly equal and the federal government would ensure that all Black and white men had the same political rights. That’s basically the vision they had for Reconstruction. And it failed. The great tragedy of Reconstruction is that it doesn’t secure Black equality or Black prosperity. Reconstruction fell far short of what the Republican Party intended in the South."