The rise and fall of the second American republic Reconstruction, 1860-1920

In this ambitious study, historian Sinha (The Slave's Cause) traces Reconstruction's ramifications beyond its span as official government policy from 1865 to 1877. She proposes that the 60-year period between Abraham Lincoln's election and the ratification of the 19th Amendment comprised a singular and continuous battle between the forces of "interracial democracy" and "reactionary authoritarianism." After emphasizing what a triumph for the democratic side of this battle the federal Reconstruction policy was--it secured civil rights for the formerly enslaved and enacted programs of land redistribution and public education--Sinha uncovers a fascinating array of the policy's ideological ripple effects. Not only did Reconstruction inspire demands for more rights from early populist political movements--including the women's movement and the labor movement--but it also provoked those opposed to these movements to adopt an "anti-government" political playbook similar to the one that eventually overthrew Reconstruction. For example, Sinha shows that activist homesteaders in Wisconsin, who wanted to seize Native land, used the same language to denigrate Native people as "dependent" on the government that was used to deride freedmen in the South. By 1920, Sinha writes, this anti-government ideology had become ascendent, forming the backbone of laissez-faire, anti-welfare federal policy. Her shrewdly argued study ties together many loose ends while providing propulsively narrated accounts of on-the-ground political violence and activism. It's an all-encompassing new perspective on American history. (Mar.)

A nuanced history of Reconstruction and the ongoing resistance movements it begat. Reconstruction, roughly the period between 1865 and 1877, is often considered a failure. Insufficiently enforced by the victorious North, it allowed an intransigent "reassertion of the authority of local white elites to act with impunity and defy the rule of law" in the putatively vanquished South. As Sinha, author of The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition, the cause of Black liberation was halfhearted from the start: Lincoln had not committed himself to a multiracial democracy, but was instead investigating schemes to resettle former slaves in Africa, the Caribbean, and South America, places that would become involved in the expansion of the American empire that began nearly the moment that Reconstruction was abandoned. Yet in the dozen years when Reconstruction was attempted, writes Sinha, allied causes formed. Abolitionists became women's suffragists, Black as well as white, with one activist for Black rights, Anna Dickinson, hailed as having "statesmanship much beyond our twaddling politicians." Like Lincoln, Ulysses Grant explored the prospect of colonization by the emancipated, with an eye to annexing the Dominican Republic; those abolitionists and suffragists in turn added opposition to annexation as well as taking up the cause of the rights of laborers. All came collapsing down with the rise of armed terrorism in the South in the form of paramilitary groups such as the Red Shirts and, of course, the KKK, which Sinha considers a forerunner of the "fascist paramilitary organizations that brought terror and violence to cities in Italy and Germany in the twentieth century." Reconstruction's failure ushered in authoritarianism, predatory capitalism, and an America that was "not a democracy but a racist, authoritarian state comparable to European colonies in Asia and Africa." A strong addition to modern studies of Reconstruction, bringing feminist and internationalist elements to the fore. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.