After the Civil war, the Union was reestablished in racism.
Reconstruction was the constitutional effort (13th, 14th, 15th amendment) of the north to force the south to treat the freed slaves as citizens. Reconstruction failed miserably. It is one of the least glorious parts of American history. Some nationalists like to think that there are no badly edifying chapters of America, and decide to forget about it. The civil war was one of the big three events along with the Revolution and World War Two. Everybody knows about the civil war, but when it comes to reconstruction, most of my friends have never heard of it.
I think it is a travesty and just ignorant of our society to not teach about Reconstruction in history classes. Reconstruction was the period directly after the Civil war. What it mainly did was consign African Americans to ninety years of second-class citizenship. The term second-class citizen is a horrible term for what actually was made of them.
African Americans went through ninety years of Jim Crowe laws. After the Civil war, John Bingham wrote the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth, amendments.These had to be included because the original constitution was a pro slavery document. The original constitution was schmoozed and did not confront racism whatsoever. Half of the people who wrote it actually owned slaves. The United States has been called a country with a “constitution fetish”.
The United States was the first country to have a dominating written law of the land. This idea conquered the world. Even dictators have constitutions. Just like how no Iraqi had a say in their constitution, African Americans had no say in theirs.
Lincoln wanted the reconstruction amendments because he thought the country would only get stronger if we were all one or all the other. Lincoln knew slavery had to be abolished. That was his reasoning behind the war, even though he did not say this early on in the war because there were still iffy states. Everyone could kind of tell that this was a war to end slavery though. In Robert E.
Lee’s and Ulysses S. Grant both wrote in their memoirs during the war that they knew if the North won the war, slavery would be abolished.Lincoln knew that bringing slavery into the war was the best thing to do when he did. He made the civil war a moral battle. Some historians even say that the south started to lose the war after Lincoln made it a moral battle, because they knew they were doing something horrible.
When the war was over and the Union was victorious, the two sides had opposing ideas. The north wanted to make African Americans full-fledged citizens. That was the last thing the south wanted to do. The Union said too bad, instated the reconstruction amendments.Millions of slaves were free.
Citizenship was not defined in the original constitution and before the amendments; states could decide who was a citizen. Not Anymore; the new amendments made it so the federal government tells the states who is a citizen. With that, they also state that the federal government will become the protector of the citizens. Ex confederates actually had to go to congress to gain citizenship. Equal protection of the laws was made.
Soon after this, John Wilkes Booth assassinated President Lincoln. Then, Andrew Johnson became president.It turned out that he was an obnoxious racist and Union dominated congress did not like him very much. They impeached Andrew Johnson and Ulysses S. Grant became president.
Grant could be called the greatest general of all time. Three confederate armies were captured during the civil war. Grant was the man behind all three of them. Grant’s plan was pretty much Lincoln’s plan, so this put the Union back on track.
Soon after Grants inauguration, free slaves had a meeting in New Orleans to figure out what to do. The white southerners showed up at the meeting and murdered 200 of them.Grant’s response was sending troops back into the South to make sure the south followed the new amendments. He could not be nice to them anymore. The Union might have won the war, but they lost peace. Racism became “the American dilemma”.
Some say racism is the number one story in American history. I think race is illogical, unreasonable, a misconception, and a big mistake. There is no such thing as race. We really are all mutts. The North barely tried to set the south straight, there was well meaning involved, and some effort was given I guess.
But it only lasted for twelve years.The last federal troops pulled out of the south in 1877 and only showed up to make sure blacks voted anyway. If blacks were interested in voting, they got a visit from the nightriders who would murder them. Within twenty years of being permitted to vote, no blacks were voting. It does not matter what the law says if the law is not being enforced. So after the nation reunited in racism, the United States was officially a racist country.
People are hung up on the constitution today, but during reconstruction, the constitution was not enforced in many ways.In the south, there were many lynching’s going on that were treated like festivals. After they hung someone, the town would pose for pictures with the corpse and sell the picture as a postcard for the town. The north could not get the federal troops to stop these and the cops and sheriffs of the southern towns were usually in the crowd supporting it. The southerners completely evaded the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments. Blacks were under Jim Crowe laws, which meant that everything was segregated between blacks and whites.
White people would not even get blood transfusions from blacks because they thought they were so alien. The wretchedness carried on for a whole ninety years until the civil rights movement ended this heinousness with the civil rights movement in 1964. This is after Hitler ruined racism by bringing about crimes of humanity that the United States had to deal with. This led to Martin Luther King taking peaceful protesting from Mohandas Gandhi and ending segregation.
Civil rights completely embarrassed the federal government and it made them live up to the law, thus ending segregation.Some call the civil rights movement the “second reconstruction”. We should all have learned a valuable lesson from this, but the South was once again ignorant and created the “myth of the lost cause”. Some southern nationalists believe that they lost the war due to the force of the North, and not their collapse from the inside.
They also like to think that the war was not about racism, or atleast cover that fact up. The myth of the lost cause was a concerted effort by the south to change the history of the civil war to get themselves off the hook. It was a huge success.Jefferson Davis wrote his memoirs and rarely even spoke of racism, even though it obviously was the main point of the war. He refers to slaves as “them” and tried to write them out of history.
People look at the civil war now and call it “a triumph of blacks and freedom”. The civil war might have been a stepping stone for blacks but it also put African Americans through hell for almost a century. Also, part of the myth is that slaves were happy; good joke. Robert E. Lee was once with the North, and then he ended up leading armies of enslavement. He is not known as a traitor but a great general.
All of the southern generals are called “losers of a valiant cause” instead of what they really are; horrible people. There is even a confederate flag day in the south! The way I see it, this day honors the confederacy and everything that came with it. That’s like having a Nazi day in Germany; I wouldn’t even be surprised if there was such thing. Bedford Forest, the founder of the Ku Klux Klan, has a shrine and statue at his burial site in a park in Memphis. This is an outrage, especially since Memphis is fifty-eight percent black. People are trying to actually have his grave moved.
Things like this are what happens in post-racial America. We are not even in post-racial America yet because there is still racism all around. Racism is an artificial concept that can be learned. It is not even a real thing. If people could just admit their mistakes (reconstruction, Hitler, etc.
. ) and understand race. There would be a lot more peace in the world and probably more productivity for all. Sources: My class notes from 1/30/2012 and 2/1/2012 Doug Kendall, “Ignoring the Reconstruction Amendments”, 3/27/2008 Sean Wilentz, “Who’s Buried in the History Books? ”, 3/14/2010
