RECONSTRUCTION’S LOST CAUSE

ALLEN GUELZO, director of the Civil War Era Studies Program at Gettysburg College (), is the author of six Civil War histories and his most recent book, , details the problems afflicting the reintegration of the Confederacy into the Union. Optimism in the North was strong at first, he says. While reading John Greenleaf Whittier’s 1866 narrative poem , he realized that the poet’s celebrated New England rural life was a template for Reconstruction. Many Northerners believed that creating a capitalist economy in the South was the first priority and felt, naively, that racial and political problems arising from emancipation would solve themselves.”