John Rose Ficklen was a professor of history at Tulane and an historian of Louisiana. His History of Reconstruction in Louisiana was a long term project that he was assembling when he unexpectedly died in 1907.The book was polished and published by Ficklen's protege, Pierce Butler, in 1911. Ficklen's original study was the first work focused on Louisiana's Reconstruction, which had started earlier than most Southern states and was identified by Nordhoff, Bowers, and others as the most dysfunctional, corrupt, and violent of the Reconstruction South. Ficklen's composition ended with 1868, thus explaining his subtitle, but the work remained a standard of scholarship so that Ella Lonn, who published the thorough Reconstruction in Louisiana in 1918, began her history in 1868 and gave Ficklen the last word on Louisiana during and immediately after the War.

Louisiana's experience of War and Reconstruction was unique in an early occupation and controversial martial government by General Butler in early 1862, the remarkable exception of Louisiana parishes from Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, and the radical policy of plunder under the auspices of the Confiscation Acts. Milder and more conciliatory policies by General Banks followed Butler's tumultuous administration, but the legal confusions, especially the obscurity of the status and political potential of the former slaves, framed the controversies that defined the era.

This book has been re-published from the original text by Tall Men Press. It is not a facsimile reprint.