" Vaguer in memory are the broader influences on my choice of a topic. Most vivid are the political upheavals of the late 1960s and '70s. It was a disconcerting time to be in graduate school, to say the least. The cities were on fire; universities, on strike. Antiwar marchers thronged the streets of Washington. American innocence lay in shambles in the wake of the assassination of the Kennedy brothers and Dr. King. Racism had been rediscovered, as had class and poverty. It was as though all the icons of my boyhood had fallen with the abruptness of monuments being pulled from their plinths and pedestals.
The unrest affected how my generation approached history. We wanted it to be relevant. We wanted usable role models. And in some undefined way we wanted to stamp our generation identity on the way the past was interpreted and understood.
The intellectual ferment revolutionized received historiography. For what I learned in high school and college was not what I learned in graduate school. What I learned as an undergraduate was consensus history, variations on the theme that Americans had never seriously disagreed over ideology and that capitalism, having arrived on the first ships, was predistined to prevail in whatever form. The viewpoint was well suited to the prosperous 1950s, when it looked as though the American Century might last forever. By the time I reached graduate school, however, the easy optimism had been badly shaken by international and domestic setbacks, and consensus history had come under sustained attack.
Many of the broadsides came from historians who were more attuned to ideology than were their predecessors. In the 1960s they had discovered an alternative to Lockean liberalism. They termed this alternative political tradition "classical republicanism." Classical republicanism was refreshing in its insistance that community came before profit. It was even more appealing in its corollary assumption that a republic's political health and well-being depended on a broad distribution of productive property; that is, on the economic and political empowerment of the common man. Nothing here heralded the inevitable triumph of corporate capitalism. In other words, there had been alternatives, roads not taken. We took heart. Around the same time, practitioners of the "new" social history, largely influenced by the moral and intellectual example of the new-Marxist historian E. P. Thompson, were energetically [rewriting] the past from the bottom up, discovering dissenting voices aplenty in antebellum artisans, yeomen farmers, and southern slaves.
It was exciting stuff, and during the extended coffee breaks and evening beer sessions that often pass for graduate training, my generation discussed and debated the new literature as if the Rosetta Stone itself had been dropped into our laps.
Meanwhile, Reconstruction revisionism had been proceeding on a seperate line of attack. This historiographical offensive had been underway since the 1930s- partly a campaign of the Old Left (as distinct from the New Left of the 1960s). A lot of the corrective work had been completed by the time my generation took aim at the post-emancipation South. Reconstruction revisionist had razed the racial and sectional mythology that had propped up the old Dunningite interpretation. The new overview was a model common sense and balanced reasonableness. There was one problem, as we saw things: the new interpetation looked like an inversion of what had stood before. Erstwhile villians such as the carpetbaggers and scalawags weren't the penniless scoundrels of Reconstruction lore. State Republican governments weren't unrelievedly corrupt. The redeemers who overthrew Reconstruction, often by extralegal fraud and violence, weren't good government Galahads in shining armor. Black Reconstruction wasn't all that black. The new interpetation was a series of negations.
Surely there was more to it than that, we insisted in our callow youth.
One question nettled us above all others. It still bedevils modern scholarship on the subject: why did Reconstruction fail? Evidence had just appeared from both ends of American history indicating that racism was deeply woven into the social fabric. What with our demands for relevance, we were sure that contemporary America's problems with race and poverty had a lot to do with preceding century's most egregious failures. The conviction made us impatient, maybe even selfrightous. Why did free labor and free enterprise fail to introduce democratic prosperity to the prostrate South?
For that matter, why did the triumphalist North balk at remaking the plantation South in the image of the small-farm North if classical republicanism was the litmus test of political and economic well-being?
..."New Masters" argue[s] that the primary motive was not to revolutionize the plantation order, but to perpetuate it. It was not to uplift the ex-slaves...but to profit from their labor. The freedmen refused to play their roles, for the ex-slaves had their own agenda, and it was not to earn quick profits for their liberators. So, in frustration and disgust, northern planters embraced a cultural rascism all too familiar to our own time. If African Americans were unable to bootstrap themselves into farm ownership, it must be because of ingrained deficiencies in ambition, self-discipline, and thrift-virtues celebrated by the free-labor creed. The fault, in other words, must lie with the victims, not the social and economic character of the new order..."
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I've read the preview on Google Books and its very imformative on exactly what happended to slaves, ex-slaves, Southern plantations and farmers during and after the Civil War.
David Upton