Du Bois wrote in a blistering critique in 1935: 'they cannot conceive Negroes as men.' Du Bois saw Reconstruction as a noble effort to establish genuine democracy in the South. 'One fact and one alone explains the attitude of most recent writers toward Reconstruction,' W. It was terrible, but not true - as African-Americans knew. It is 'like writing history with lightning,' he said, 'and my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.' Griffith's repugnant classic, 'The Birth of a Nation.' Woodrow Wilson, a political scientist and Princeton professor before he became president, viewed the film in the White House. That was Reconstruction at our finest universities (nowhere more than at Columbia, where Foner now holds an endowed chair) and it was Reconstruction in popular novels, histories and films, most notably D. Home rule was restored, the South redeemed. All seemed lost, until the Ku Klux Klan arose and expelled the carpetbaggers, dragged the scalawags back to the white side of the color line and put the former slaves in their place. What followed was a 'tragic era' of military occupation, corrupt state governments, heavy taxation, wasteful spending and, worst of all, 'Negro rule': the enfranchising of ignorant, gullible, bestial black men. In that history, Lincoln's magnanimous plan for reunion died with him, as power-hungry, South-hating Radical Republicans in Congress rolled over Andrew Johnson and set out to punish the South for the war.

Horrible history: the distortions, misinformation and myths that passed for 'the facts of Reconstruction' for nearly a century after 1877.

Yet when it comes to those years, ignorance is progress, a step in the right direction. ERIC FONER wrote 'Forever Free' to combat what he calls our 'sheer ignorance' of the 15 years between the Emancipation Proclamation and the withdrawal of the last federal troops from the South in 1877.

Foner reconstruction