US Civil War, Reconstruction and US Foreign Policy

Thoughts on my blog regarding the US Civil War, Reconstruction, and US foreign policy. While my focus has been on the antebellum period and the events leading up to the South’s secession, I’ve become more engaged with the period after the war. Recently finished Eric Foner’s Reconstruction and now reading Manisha Sinha’s, The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860-1920; David Blight’s Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory as well. All three books essentially explore how the emancipationist legacy of the war lost out to the reconciliationist legacy, whereby the gains of the Freedman’s Bureau and freedpeople’s efforts to fulfill the objectives of Reconstruction were wiped away by the counterrevolutionary terror and violence in the former Confederate states. While the debate endlessly continues regarding the origins of the Civil War, the post-war period and its brutal aftermath has not garnered the same level of attention. I hope to explore this topic and others going forward.