Eric Foner's Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 has dominated historical writing on the postbellum United States since its publication in 1988. The book offered a compelling and convincing account of a critical moment in American history when so much seemed possible and so little (insofar as race relations were concerned) was achieved. But while it deserved all the encomiums lavished upon it, the synthesis was not all-encompassing. Topics such as gender and religion merited more sustained attention and the author made only limited attempts to situate American Reconstruction in the context of other slave emancipations across the globe. This new collection of essays, centred upon the helpful (though by no means original) concept that Reconstruction should be viewed as a continuation of the Civil War, is uneven in quality as most such collections are. However, it suggests two particularly fruitful topics for any brave soul planning to write the follow-up to Foner's magisterial text: the role of white Unionists in the failure of Reconstruction and the impact of military defeat on the former Confederates.

The book opens with a trio of fine essays by Derek W. Frisby, Aaron Astor and Anne E. Marshall. Collectively they reveal how, after the war ended, large numbers of white Unionists in Missouri, Kentucky and western Tennessee quickly joined with ex-Rebels to reassert control over the blacks in the post-emancipation South. In Kentucky, a notionally loyal state where slavery was not formally abolished until ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in late 1865, the presence of African American troops merely exacerbated fears among white Unionists as well as the former Confederates that emancipation portended social disaster. The result of such deep-rooted anxieties was, first, widespread white supremacist violence which state and federal authorities were barely able to contain and, second, growing support among loyalists for the virulently racist Democratic Party. In Alabama, as Margaret M. Storey makes clear in another insightful piece, white Unionists were more inclined than their border-state peers to cooperate with blacks inside the southern Republican Party but here too white terror and Democratic political power soon rendered black civil rights gains during Reconstruction depressingly nugatory.

The other significant cluster of essays in this book limns the mindset of the defeated Confederates. In a broadly sympathetic study of South Carolina's Reconstruction governor Wade Hammond III, Rod Andrew Jr. suggests that the Rebels' wartime sufferings played as formative a role in the construction of Lost Cause mythology as the desire to dominate blacks. Jason Phillips concurs that the actions of southern whites during Reconstruction must be interpreted in the light of their wartime experiences, especially their persistent battle- and Bible-hardened ethos of invincibility and superiority, but he demonstrates more effectively than Andrew that the ex-Confederates were driven as much by hatred of the Yankees and their black allies as by grief for the Rebel dead.

Foner's commitment to the notion of black agency was central to his pathbreaking interpretation. The best of these essays caution us against exaggerating the possibilities for African American progress in the United States after the Civil War. For that brutal conflict spawned corrosive new enmities, and most southern whites, loyalists and Rebels alike were doggedly committed to defending the colour line.