�Knowing Which Way the Wind was Blowing during Reconstruction�

Abstract

The events of Reconstruction played out within the context of an agrarian society where most people lived in rural areas, close to nature and susceptible to the fickle whims of weather and climate. A dry summer, a wet spring, a sudden flood, or an early killing frost may have put a locality’s agricultural economy out of joint for a while and spun off other political or social reverberations. Understanding how these various political, economic, social, and climactic factors played off each other to produce the volatile events of the Reconstruction era will present a challenging puzzle for historians to unravel. Such an effort to bring weather and climate into the historiography of Reconstruction will be possible only by consulting the standardized forms and consistently kept journals of government weather observers that tell us how hot was the air, how many clouds filled the sky, and which way the wind was blowing.