A SHORT HISTORY of RECONSTRUCTION: 1863-1877 (audiobook) by Eric Foner

Originally published in book form in 1990.
Published in 2017 by Blackstone Audio.
Read by Paul Heitsch.
Duration: 12 hours, 33 minutes.
Unabridged (see below)

Clocking in at 12 and one-half hours, A Short History of Reconstruction: 1863-1877 is an abridgment of a larger work about Reconstruction that Foner published in 1988.  Still, it is plenty long enough to reveal the scope of the tragedy that was the post-Civil War Reconstruction.

Abraham Lincoln often thought about the conditions necessary to bring the seceded states back into the Union. He called that plan Reconstruction because the separate state governments would be rebuilt and then the Union itself would be reformed.

There were certain ground rules, including not letting power players in the Confederate and seceded state governments return to power. Most importantly, slavery had to be ended in the areas under the authority of the Emancipation Proclamation that was effective on January 1, 1863.

When Lincoln was assassinated, Vice President Andrew Johnson was forced to take the lead in Reconstruction. However, he was not nearly the politician that Abraham Lincoln was and soon enough, the Congress took the lead in Reconstruction. Their disagreements over Reconstruction was one of the reasons Johnson was impeached.

But, there were still promising results. African Americans voted and started schools and their own churches and went to Congress and became sheriffs and city council members and more.

Grant's eight years as President were a mixed bag. The KKK flared up again only to be squashed by outright military intervention. But, the North was tired of dealing with the South and its issues. If you start counting at the start of the Civil War, by the time the election of 1877 came along, they had been dealing with the those issues for 17 straight years. To get a contemporary 21st century analogy - think about how strong the American public feels about the war in Afghanistan in the year 2020. So, when the election of 1876 was too close to call, a deal was made and Reconstruction came to an end under Rutherford B. Hayes.

Foner details how almost everything fell apart and so many fell into the near-serfdom of sharecropping and Jim Crow laws. Interestingly, the GDP of the South was the same in 1900 as it was in 1880 - absolutely no economic growth at all over 20 years.

President Andrew Johnson (1808-1875)

Foner does point out that things weren't a whole lot better for African Americans in the North and that organized labor of any sort in general struggled in the North (and was practically non-existent in the South).

The audiobook was read by Paul Heitsch whose reading style reminded me (too often) of the automated voice you get when you call a bank or an airline. Also, he mispronounced several words. For example, he consistently mispronounced the word "lien" (used throughout the sharecropper section) lee-un.

This was not a pleasant book - no one likes to hear about the almost complete failure of the country to protect the civil rights of its people. But, this is an important piece of our history.

I rate this audiobook 4 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: A Short History of Reconstruction: 1863-1877.