Book review: Heather Cox Richardson, The death of Reconstruction: race, labor, and politics in the post-Civil War North, 1865–1901. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2001

One of the principal advances of the past generation of scholarship constructed around black workers' self-activity in the Age of Emancipation is renewed attention to the ways in which, for both master and slave, the race and labor questions were inextricably bound. Heather Cox Richardson's new study underlines the significance of that insight: faced with the disintegration of the free labor ideal in the cauldron of class conflict that was the post-war North, she argues, Republican misgivings over freed peoples' labor militancy, rather than an all-out retreat from the ideal of racial equality, best explains the capitulation of Radical Republicans and the collapse of Reconstruction.