Reconstruction: The Battle for Democracy. 1865-1876

What would be the consequences of the American Civil War? Would African-Americans become free citizens in the American Republic? With the end of slavery would Black families get freedom, the vote, forty acres and a mule?

“The sun rose upon emancipation,” Allen writes, “and set upon the struggle for land and liberty.” In the war’s aftermath, “the Negro masses” emerged as a revolutionary force. Their demand for the confiscation of planters’ land and its redistribution to the former slaves became “a pivot around which the revolution revolved.” Allen devotes his longest chapter to a careful examination of the land issue during and immediately after the war.

Southern historians suggested that African-Americans were unfit for democracy, hence the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, segregation, and laws to keep the Negro in their place. Reconstruction: The Battle for Democracy offers a powerful, coherent account of Reconstruction that challenged every assumption of this – the Dunning School of history - and anticipated many of the insights of today’s scholarship, none more so than his emphasis on the centrality of the land question.

Contents: Introduction: First Phase of the Revolution; The Johnson Reaction; Fighting for Land; Victory of the Left; Fighting for Democracy; The People's Assemblies; The Labor Movement; Revolution and Counter-Revolution; Summary; Appendices. With a new Foreword By Eric Foner