Member Review Reconstruction Revisionism

Philip Leigh · Dec 19, 2022

In the article linked below Helen Andrews of the American Conservative magazine suggests that the revisionism that has resulted in today's dominant view of Reconstruction as a noble experiment began in the 1960s when most everyone capable of any memory of the era was dead. Much of the article focuses on a re-issue of W.E.B. duBois 1935 Black Reconstruction.

There is no point beating around the bush: The version of Reconstruction history that Du Bois presents is based on motivated reasoning and tendentious distortions of the evidence. That is why it is so disturbing that this [Foner] school is now the conventional wisdom. With no tools other than repetition and vehemence, these brazen innovators succeeded in getting their misrepresentations enthroned as orthodoxy and the commonsense histories of yesterday not just superseded but slandered as racist.

Andrews concludes that Reconstruction was objectively bad for whites as well as blacks.

Southern [Carpetbag and Scalawag] corruption was not just a matter of a little graft here and there. It was the complete subordination of every level of government to the personal enrichment of a few. . . Reconstruction ended not because Southerners overthrew it but because Northern liberals could no longer in good conscience defend it

The first hand records of thousands of Southerners in books, letters and diaries are casually dismissed by today's dominant school of Reconstruction understanding.

This is how all Reconstruction revisionists must treat primary sources, as so many lies and delusions.

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/reconstruction-revisionism/

DanSBHawk · Dec 19, 2022