(Other conquered US foes , get rebuilt. We got reconstucted. And it continues today…. – DD)

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(Abbieville Institute) – Today, when partisans of America’s two corrupt political parties throw simpleminded “history lessons” at one other, Philip Leigh has written something quite remarkable: a sober and measured account of Reconstruction. This is all the more noteworthy since Reconstruction has been a sacred cow for five or more decades. The current story is a utopian one about a tragically “unfinished” social democratic “revolution,” which strongly resembles the old Stalinist account by James S. Allen in Reconstruction: The Battle for Democracy, 1865–1876 (1937).[1]

Introduction

As long ago as 1961, historian William Appleman Williams told us that the Gilded Age in the North and Reconstruction in South needed to be fitted into a single historical framework (Contours of American History, 312-313). Leigh’s book is an outstanding example of just how to do that. His first example involves Amos Akerman of New Hampshire, a former Confederate quartermaster, who as U.S. Attorney General prosecuted the Ku Klux Klan from November 1870 to December 1871 Akerman’s great mistake was to irritate Union Pacific Railroad moguls, which led President Ulysses S. Grant to demand his resignation. Here a definite pattern emerged: it seems the administration was more committed to its friends’ and cronies’ commercial gains than it was to freedmen’s rights. In a similar spirit in 1894, federal officials redeployed some anti-Klan legal tools of 1871 against labor unions, much as the Fourteenth Amendment did far more, for several decades, for corporations (as legal “persons”) than for African Americans.

Foundations of Change

In Chapter I, Leigh makes it clear that there was much more on the federal table than concern for the freedmen of the Southern and Border states. As he puts it, “The Civil War transformed our entire country, not merely the South.” Central to the Lincoln administration’s concerns was the Republican Party’s ambitious and expansive Hamiltonian-Whig program of…

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