Foner - Forever Free: the Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction

A cogent and gripping account aimed at a wide audience makes the long-term resonances and contemporary significance of Reconstruction more apparent than ever.

Salon

For too long and in too many places, it has been intellectually fashionable to teach the Civil War as a cataclysmic collision to save the Union, with the liberation and uplifting of enslaved black millions as a sentimental byproduct. Forever Free is an eloquent correctivepainful, inspiring, and compelling.

Richard Kluger, author of Simple Justice

Shows us a way to get beyond the lingering stereotypes and misconceptions about race in America.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch

An invaluable and timely book. Foner has performed a major service, masterfully synthesizing a huge body of scholarship covering a multitude of topics strung out over a long and thorny stretch of historyand doing so at the expense of neither complexity nor nuance powerful.

American History Review

Eric Foner makes penetratingly clear that sometimes willfully misunderstood period known as Reconstruction. He starts the story far back, in slavery, and brings us up through the decades into the civil rights struggles of our own era. Throughout, the book is uncommonly aided by photographic and graphic arta kind of running commentary on our national arc of sorrow.

Paul Hendrickson, author of Sons of Mississippi

Readable and convincing. Gives as good an account of the politics of Reconstruction as one could hope for.

Books & Culture Magazine

No historian has done more to explain the importance of the Civil War and Reconstruction than Eric Foner. In Forever Free, he has accomplished a miracle of compression, distilling this epic story and exploring the profound consequences of the era for our own times. Equally remarkable is the collection of rare, compelling illustrations. This book is both a narrative and a visual tour de force.

T. J. Stiles, author of Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War

Foner balances his passion for racial equality and social justice with disciplined scholarship. His book is a valuable, fluid introduction to a complex period.

Publishers Weekly (starred review)

This crisply written and beautifully illustrated book brings together the greatest historian of Reconstruction, Eric Foner, with period art and photographs skillfully selected by Joshua Brown, to provide the finest narrative yet crafted of this complex and pivotal era for a broad audience. This volume belongs in every book club and reading group in America.

David W. Blight, author of Race and Reunion:
The Civil War in American Memory

Illustrations edited and with commentary by Joshua Brown

Eric Foner, a winner of the Bancroft Prize and the Francis Parkman Prize, is the DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His books include The Story of American Freedom and Politics and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War. He lives in New York City.

Joshua Brown is the executive director of the American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His books include Beyond the Lines: Pictorial Reporting, Everyday Life, and the Crisis of Gilded Age America. He lives in New York City.

ALSO BY THE AUTHORS

BY ERIC FONER
Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men:
The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War

Tom Paine and Revolutionary America

Politics and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War

Nothing but Freedom: Emancipation and Its Legacy

Reconstruction: Americas Unfinished Revolution, 18631877

Freedoms Lawmakers: A Directory of Black Officeholders During Reconstruction

A Short History of Reconstruction

Americas Reconstruction: People and Politics After the Civil War

A House Divided: America in the Age of Lincoln (with Olivia Mahoney)

The Story of American Freedom

Who Owns History? Rethinking the Past in a Changing World

Give Me Liberty! An American History

BY JOSHUA BROWN
Who Built America? Working People and the Nations Economy,
Politics, Culture, and Society (Visual Editor)

History from South Africa: Alternative Visions and Practices (Coeditor)

Who Built America? From the Centennial Celebration of 1876
to the Great War of 1914, CD-ROM (with Roy Rosenzweig and Stephen Brier)

Who Built America? From the Great War of 1914 to the Dawn of the Atomic Age,
CD-ROM (with Roy Rosenzweig and Stephen Brier)

Beyond the Lines:
Pictorial Reporting, Everyday Life, and the Crisis of Gilded Age America

FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, NOVEMBER 2006

Copyright 2005 by Forever Free, Inc.

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2005.

Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Foner, Eric.
Forever free : the story of emancipation and Reconstruction / Eric Foner; illustrations edited and with commentary by Joshua Brown.1st ed.
p. cm.
Forever Free project : Peter O. Almond, Stephen Brier, senior producers;
Christine Doudna, editor.
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Reconstruction (U.S. history, 18651877). 2. SlavesEmancipationUnited States. 3. United StatesHistoryCivil War, 18611865African Americans. 4. United StatesRace relationsHistory19th century. 5. United StatesPolitics and government18651900. I. Brown, Joshua, 1949 II. Forever Free, Inc. III. Title.
E668.F655 2005
973.8dc22 2005040706

eISBN: 978-0-307-83458-4

Author photograph Neil Ryder Hoos / W.W. Norton & Company

www.vintagebooks.com

v3.1

To the late
W. W. Law of Savannah, Georgia, historian, citizen, activist,
whose life and work embody the first and second Reconstructions;
and to
Herbert Gutman, scholar, mentor, enthusiast;
and to
Sergei Bodrov, Jr.;
and to
Cornelia Bailey and the Bailey family of Sapelo Island, Georgia,
who live the tradition of Emancipation and Reconstruction

The most magnificent drama in the last thousand years of human history is the transportation of ten million human beings out of the dark beauty of their mother continent into the newfound Eldorado of the West. They descended into Hell; and in the third century they arose from the dead, in the finest effort to achieve democracy for the working millions which this world had ever seen