![]() ![]() ![]() Foner outlines the variation in Southern attitudes and economic status by region and class, pointing out that many yeomen outside the plantation regions had opposed secession and been burdened with much of the Southern war expense due to unfair tax policy-they could possibly be enticed into a postwar coalition with blacks as the earliest efforts sought to replace planter hegemony. ![]() The information in the first half is important, just hard to get through. Just as bad, it abandoned black southerners to violence and poverty, and betrayed the Union dead by allowing antebellum leaders and policies to return. It turned the party from the champion of abolition, free labor rights, and government as catalyst of development to the enforcer for Gilded Age magnates and advocate of small government. But the second half focuses on how racism, postwar economic events, and evolving concepts of the appropriate scope of government ended up reversing both the gains of Reconstruction in the South and the identity of the national Republican Party. The first half is a dry and dense recital of the change in federal laws and early state constitutions that commenced Reconstruction. ![]()
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