Economic Reconstruction

 

Mr. Leigh presented this paper at the 2019 Abbeville Institute Summer School on The New South.

Historians have reinterpreted Civil War Reconstruction over the past fifty years. Shortly before the Centennial it was commonly believed that the chief aim of the Republican-dominated Congress was to ensure lasting Party control of the federal government by creating a reliable voting bloc in the South for which improved racial status among blacks was a coupled, but secondary, objective. By the Sesquicentennial, however, it had become the accepted view that the Republican desire for racial equality was untainted by anything more than negligible self interest. Consequently, the presently dominant race-centric focus on Reconstruction minimizes factors that affected all Southerners of all races.

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