Get Started On The Wars Of Reconstruction: The Brief, Violent History Of Americas Most Progressive Era Designed By Douglas R. Egerton Offered As Leaflet

enough history of an important period, but from an interpretive standpoint I am not sure what this volume brings that has not already been far more incisively described in its predecessors, most notably, W.
E. B. DuBois' "Black Reconstruction in America", What I find so disturbing about Egerton's review of the period of reconstruction following the Civil War, is that we're still fighting the same bigotry and racist bullshit that was so out in the open during reconstruction.
The only difference today is that it's more sophisticated and not as blatant but the goal is the same.
The white supremacists have not gone away, they walk among us, just as determined now as they were into subjugate the black race to a permanent lower class of citizenship.
This is what Trump has revealed, He didn't create it but he certainly has enhanced it, There is no shame and no conscience in today's racist, They think just because they don't use the "N word" or they're not lynching black people that somehow their political opinions have validity.
What an utter crock of shit, You see what's going on with voting rights in the former confederate states and other republican controlled states.
We're still fighting the Civil War and Egerton's book illustrates it brilliantly, The weakest book I've read on Reconstruction, Egerton's focus on domestic terrorism provides an incomplete picture of the period, but one most other books neglect to highlight.
I think I would've liked it more if I'd read Foner or Du Bois first, Essential American history. This book chronicles the most progressive era in American history, and shows the many ways that these reforms were introduced, resisted, and ultimately defeated by bigotry, terrorism, political opposition, and the gradual rewriting history in the popular imagination.


It's not an uplifting book, but I find it an indispensable sobering reminder of the need for activism.
If Reconstruction could be defeated, even with everything on its side the law, President Grant, both houses of Congress, three constitutional amendments, legions of activists, basic human decency and the moral high ground, et cetera et cetera, then really any fight for the soul of a nation can be lost, no matter how good the cause.


So stay woke Due to retrograde narratives such as “Gone With the Wind” we have been led to believe that Southerners were a conquered people in occupied territory.
Indeed, this might have been the case had staunch abolitionist senator Thaddeus Stevens and other radical Republicans had had their way.
The author believes, however, that most southern men returning home from the war were prepared to accept any and all of Lincolns terms and just get on with life and rebuilding.
The tragedy of Lincolns assassination was not that he was the only person who could have done the job of Reconstruction, but that Andrew Johnson was completely unequipped and unwilling to do that job.
The author relates a story in which Johnson expresses the widely held view to Frederick Douglas that plantation slaves felt superiority and contempt for the struggles of poor whites of which Johnson was born, even going so far as trying to get Frederick Douglas to admit he had felt such contempt, which Douglas denied.
From the beginning of his presidency, he signaled to the planter class that he would require little from them, and they became emboldened to regain their political might.


For Johnson, emancipation was basically the end of the subject, not the beginning of a process of leveling the playing field through redistribution of land, wealth and privilege through governmental intervention.
Many federal programs, in fact, were designed to help both the freed blacks and the poor whites in an attempt to address the social imbalances of the antebellum economy.
White children could also attend Freemens schools, which would have allowed them to pursue news and other information without relying upon upper class whites, so they were therefore discouraged from attending by the planter class.
Administrators from the Freedmens Bureau often wrote to Washington of the absolute wretchedness of the poor whites, who sometimes created a greater drain on federal aid than the freed blacks.
But “democratic movements can be halted by violence” the author says, and it was not only blacks who were targeted but any white person who attempted to help the advancement of people previously at the bottom of the social ladder.


The Freedmens Bureau was also charged with reconstituting families, which was made difficult by trying to locate people with different owners, the assumption of necessary surnames after emancipation, and the prior lack of laws governing marriage and custody.
Freed slaves knew the value of hard work after lives of uncompensated labor and were willing to put all their efforts into working land that they owned with the intention of passing it on to the next generation.
The sharecropping system took hold as it offered some limited opportunity for advancement while maintaining the hierarchy of the rural south.
Landowners marveled at the incentive for labor in this system, where previously the only incentive was to avoid the whip.
It is tantalizing to think what this country could have become had the plantations been confiscated and redistributed, breaking the monopoly of labor that strangled the blacks and poor whites.
Johnson, however, negated acts of Congress by allowing southerners to reclaim their estates by pledging allegiance to the Union and paying their taxes, thereby condoning the brand of Southern belligerence prevalent before the war to continue, eventually developing into domestic terror.
It is easy to see why voters would see Ulysses S, Grant as the candidate needed to address this growing imbalance, marrying military might with executive powers.
In the years following Grants presidency, it became the judiciary branch that was called upon to uphold provisions of the legislation passed during Reconstruction, which it often failed to do.


Victims of the Ku Klux Klan usually knew who their perpetrators were, based on their voices and horses.
Many Klansmen had fought in the Confederate Army and fell into their old ranks behind their captains.
In the backcountry where good land was scarce, white farmers who had not owned slaves took the opportunity to join forces with planters to align labor and resource control in their favor.
In the months preceding any election, they might be a spate of murders to intimidate Republicans and blacks, and to influence the swing vote, poor whites, to come to the side which was regaining its might, the Democrats.
Republicans and blacks were turned away from the polls by armed men, This was not done solely by the KKK, but also the White League, Knights of the White Camelia, and other militia who called themselves rifle clubs.
Yet when freedmen practices military drills or attempted to be prepared for attack, they were painted as lawless and insurrectionary.


Today, many southerners still believe that Reconstruction was radical and undemocratic, when in actuality it was the first period in American history in which men still no women yet of all demographics were permitted and encouraged to vote.
During the war, many Unionists documented that the runaway and emancipated slaves had political savvy and were wellinformed.
These were men who had left their families in bondage in order to fight, and probably die, for the freedom of all.
Gathered together in regiments, these men managed to become literate and educated during their little downtime, thus preparing themselves for lives as citizens.
On the Atlantic Sea Islands, many were taken over by freed blacks who set up their own governments and civil institutions.
Byblack men constituted a majority of voters in South Carolina and Mississippi, After theelections, blacks who had mostly been property just ten years earlier held more elected positions in the South than they did in.
The South had managed to hold a disproportionate power in congress through the threefifths clause, and while southern whites briefly lost this grip, they regained a similar influence once they figured out how to deny blacks the vote, while still counting them in the population when it came time to apportion House seats.


Reconstruction is considered to have ended definitively inwhen Rutherford B, Hayes withdrew federal troops from the South, but the withdrawal had been happening gradually already, with troops being clustered mainly in urban areas.
Black activism was also concentrated in urban areas, due to both the presence of protective troops and the everincreasing black urban population.
The lack of troops in the countryside accounted for the easy ascent of the KKK and disenfranchisement of rural blacks which would eventually become the southern norm by thes.
Reconstruction did not fail on its own, but collapsed due to the unending aggressions and interventions of people who had fought for slavery during the war.


I read this book at an unfortunate time the first month of Donald Trumps presidency.
The title of the book led me to believe it would be a story of uplift in the face of enormous challenges.
But no, thats not what the real sweep of this story is about, Instead, the author spends a good deal of time on Andrew Johnson, Viewed through the lens of Donald Trumps executive orders and the horrible people he is cozy with, I can see how a president, no matter how unpopular or how many people oppose him, can, through the privilege of his office, set a tone counter to the other two branches of government and set the tone for this nation which continues to this day.
Johnson was a slaveholder though as a wealthy citydweller, he could easily have afforded efficient paid help and a selfmade man, possessing a narcissism born of aspirational struggle and eventual accomplishment, with little sympathy for those below him and feelings of simpatico for his betters the planter class.
Johnson actually advocated for the states to sort through suffrage and many other issues on their own, even though the Souths claims to

states rights were what started the Civil War in the first place.
At one point, Johnson was issuing over a hundred pardons daily to the southern elite, whom he felt had suffered enough and needed to get back to their business.
In doing so, Johnson undermined the Freedmens Bureau standing as a symbol of government power, assuring the white elite that they had the executives understanding.
Nobody who had supported the Union was ever entirely safe in the South when it became clear they had no defender in the White House, giving rise to aggression intended to keep the social strata in place.
Johnson also withheld advertising patronage from newspapers that did not support his intentions for Reconstruction, He was looked upon as a disgrace to the nation for not wanting to support laws passed by Congress.
Sound familiar
.