"A Successful Repulse of Enlightenment Liberalism by Romantic Reaction"

But Reconstruction has proven to be a more balky and diffuse era than either the Dunningites or the New Reconstructionists supposed. The crusaders, black and white, who hoped to build a new South out of the ashes of the old plantation order had no plans for a proletarian paradise. Quite to the contrary, they were plain and eager in their demand for a thorough-going capitalist effacement of the kingdom of the thousand-bale planters. Northern republicans had, after all, waged their war on behalf of free labor (an ideology whose greatest expositor has always been no one other than Eric Foner), and what they expected to create in the defeated Confederacy was a mirror image of small-producer manufacturing and independent family farms. The Union 'represents the principles of free labor,' declared a New York pamphlet, and only when 'the victory of the Northern society of free labor over the landed monopoly of the Southern aristocracy' was complete could the Civil War be declared over. 'Reconstruction,' added Frederick Douglass, will 'cause Northern industry, Northern capital, and Northern civilization to flow into the South, and make a man from New England as much at home in Carolina as elsewhere in the Republic.'
"No one offered a more vigorous second to that motion than the freedpeople, who wanted nothing so much as to become self-interested bourgeois owners of property."

Allen Carl Guelzo at History News Network calls Reconstruction a attempted "bourgeois revolution."