Reconstruction in Georgia

Fair-minded and comprehensive, C. Mildred Thompson’s Reconstruction in Georgia (1915) has long been considered among the best of the state studies to emerge from Columbia University’s Dunning School. This coterie of graduate students in Professor William A. Dunning’s famed Reconstruction seminar produced studies of Reconstruction in their native states. Widely admired and appreciatively reviewed in their time, they were increasingly pilloried by revisionist scholars after mid-century.

Thompson’s book, however, won over many revisionists, among them the Reconstruction historian Vernon Lane Wharton (1907–1964), who termedReconstruction in Georgia “cautious, judicious, and temperate.” Wharton noted that Thompson’s “story of Reconstruction was no simple tale of good versus evil. She recognized and attempted to analyze the complexities to be found in men and social change.”

When the historian Alan Conway attempted a revision of Thompson in his The Reconstruction of Georgia (1966), he did not “attempt…to duplicate in detail what has already been adequately covered” in “a very good piece of work.”

Thompson’s admirers were not only academic, however, as she found when she received an appreciative letter from fellow Atlantan Margaret Mitchell, who confessed that she had depended on Reconstruction in Georgia in writing the post-war section of Gone with the Wind.

This new edition reintroduces Thompson’s classic to new readers as the Reconstruction Sesquicentennial gets underway. It corrects the major flaw of the original by including a full index, and also offers a detailed biographical sketch of the author.