Lecture Summary: Civil War and Reconstruction in History and Memory

We began charting the far-reaching consequences of the Civil War and Reconstruction, both as nineteenth-century historical events that reshaped Southern politics and society and as key components of twentieth-century racial and regional identities.

I noted that the federal government did not enter the war with the aim of emancipating the slaves or reconstructing Southern society. As president, Abraham Lincoln was dedicated first and foremost to restoring the Union, with or without the abolition of slavery. He embraced emancipation as a war aim only after it became clear that slavery had begun to collapse in Union-occupied areas throughout the South and that emancipation would come with or without government sanction. As tens of thousands of black refugees attached themselves to the advancing Union Army, white military officers saw an opportunity to deprive the South of much-needed labor and declared the fugitive slaves "contraband of war." Political and diplomatic pressure for emancipation intensified and, in January 1863, Lincoln issued his famous proclamation.

I discussed some of the consequences of war for Southern society:

  • the sudden, and generally unwelcome, intrusion of centralized government in the everyday lives of white Southerners

  • the growth of cities and the development of industry as byproducts of the wartime economy

  • the changing roles of Southern white women

  • the physical destruction

  • the human casualties

and, most significantly of all,

  • the emancipation of some four million African Americans

I briefly introduced the subject Reconstruction, focusing primarily on the struggle between the President and Congress to define terms for the readmission of the Southern States. We reviewed the major events of Wartime Reconstruction, Presidential Reconstruction, and Congressional Reconstruction, concluding with the Reconstruction Act of 1867, which ensured that delegates to newly convened state constitutional conventions would protect black voting rights and ratify the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The election of African-Americans to these state conventions and, later, to statewide offices under Reconstruction, combined with the temporary disfranchisement of former Confederate leaders, gave rise to charges that the white South was being subjected to "Negro rule."

To illustrate the passion with which whites viewed this issue, I passed out copies of resolutions adopted by the Conservative Convention in Richmond, Virginia, in 1867. Here's what the delegates had to say on the subject of black suffrage:

To subject the white people of these States to the absolute supremacy, in their local governments and in their representation in the Senate and House of Representatives, of the black race just emerged from personal servitude, is abhorrent to the civilization of mankind, and [subjects] us . . . to the dominion of an organized class of emancipated slaves, who are without any of the training, habits, or traditions of self-government . . .

This convention doth declare that they disclaim all hostility to the black population; that they sincerely desire to see them advance in intelligence and material prosperity, and are willing to extend to them a liberal and generous protection . . .

Yet this Convention doth distinctly declare that the government of the States and the Union were formed by white men to be subject to their control; and that suffrage should still be so regulated by the States, as to continue the Federal and State systems under the control and direction of the white race.

Reconstruction, I noted, did not last long. Virginia was readmitted to the Union under the provisions of Congressional Reconstruction in 1869; within a year, the white Conservative Party had regained control of the government. The same pattern occurred in other states, with the restoration of white conservative rule following readmission after periods ranging from one year in Georgia to nine years in South Carolina. Reconstruction officially ended in 1877, with the withdrawal of the last federal troops from the South.

Finally, at the end of the lecture, I showed some excerpts from D.W. Griffith's 1915 silent film classic Birth of a Nation, which portrayed the Civil War and Reconstruction as "black spots" on the nation's history, redeemed only by the glorious reconciliation of North and South under the banner of white supremacy. By the end of the film, the spectre of "Negro rule" in the South has been vanquished, thanks to the Ku Klux Klan and its campaign of terror against the agents of Black Republicanism in the South. Many white Americans of the early twentieth century -- North and South -- came to view this film as an accurate depiction of Civil War and Reconstruction history; generations of white historians reinforced this view until dramatic shifts in the nation's politics and racial attitudes transformed mainstream historical interpretations of the period and gave African Americans and their white allies (the so-called "carpetbaggers" and "scalawags") their due. (You might want to look, for example, at the revisionist essays by William C. Harris, "Carpetbaggers in Reality," and Eric Foner, "Black Activism and the Ku Klux Klan," in your Major Problems textbook.)