Comparison Of Charles Beard And Mary Beard: The Second American Revolution

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Charles Beard and Mary Beard called the Civil War and Reconstruction, “The Second American Revolution”. Beard was specific that the Civil War produced a shift in class power in Washington. “A revolution”, says Beard “is where one class ousts another one from power”. This is the typical definition of a revolution as the planter class (The South) ran the government before the war and were then ousted by what Beard calls the “Northern Bourgeoisie” (The Northern industrial class). Beard believes this is the cause of the war, because Beard says “The two generations of Federalists and Whigs accomplished what they had set out to do and achieved it within four years”. Economically he is referring to the very high tariffs, taxes on foreign imports, …show more content…
Their main point was that blacks were incapable of exercising intelligently the political power that the North had thrust upon them. After much needless suffering according to this view, the white community of the South banded together and overthrew these governments and restored what was called “home rule” through so-called patriotic organizations like the Ku Klux Klan, this was the darkest page in American history. This interpretation actually originated in Reconstruction during the anti-Reconstruction propaganda of democrats and Southern democrats. These historians were not only racists but lousy historians because they took at face value the claims and the accusations of the democratic party propaganda without ever actually trying to check whether these charges were true or not. They would take things out of historical party pamphlets and regurgitate on how terrible it was. This interpretation dominated historical thinking for well over half a century, with bestsellers like Claude G. Bowers’ “The Tragic Era” published in 1929. Bowers’ book about the Reconstruction told of how Andrew Johnson “fought the brave battle of a Constitutional Liberty ever waged by an executive, but was overwhelmed by the radical Southern whites” who literally were tortured during Reconstruction by representatives of hate who manipulated the simple-minded black
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