SOURCE: Godbold, E. Stanly, Jr. “A Battleground Revisited: Reconstruction in Southern Fiction, 1895-1905.” South Atlantic Quarterly 73, no. 1 (1974): 99-116.

In the following excerpt from his essay on several post-Reconstruction southern authors, Godbold discusses Dixon's novels about the Reconstruction era in the South.

The era of Reconstruction has proved to be both troublesome and fascinating for historians and novelists alike. Historians have never agreed upon what life in the South was like during Reconstruction, nor are they likely to. One group has looked upon the era as the rape of the South, in which a coalition of armed soldiers, illiterate blacks, unscrupulous whites from both North and South, and irresponsible Radical politicians stripped native white Southerners of their property and their votes, turning the area into a lawless wasteland. Others have found admirable motives in the various members of that coalition and have suggested that their era was progressive. Economic...