There are some history topics where old sources can still be quite good. This, unfortunately, is not one of them. In the years after the Civil War there was an effective effort to spin the story of Reconstruction as one of high-handed intervention by the North into the poor South that eventually failed because of incompetent freed slaves and corrupt Northern carpetbaggers. That spin would still be quite common in historical writing through much of the 20th c.

Eric Foner's Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution is recent, from a very well respected scholar. You will find over on the AskHistorians Book List as "essential reading".