Writing Assignment Instructions: This is a two part assignment. Part 1 you are to create a thesis and outline and Part 2 you are to write 4 page paper with the thesis and outline from part 1. Please

Writing Assignment Instructions: This is a two part assignment. Part 1 you are to create a thesis and outline and Part 2 you are to write 4 page paper with the thesis and outline from part 1. Please
L15 Overview During the century after the Civil War, different groups of Americans promoted competing narratives of the Civil War and Reconstruction. For the most part, veterans remained committed to their belief that their side had been right. Union veterans highlighted their role in preserving the nation and ending slavery. Former Confederates emphasized their service as its own brand of patriotism and insisted that they too had been honorable soldiers. In contrast, some Americans urged reconciliation between white northerners and white southerners and emphasized the shared sacrifice of Union and Confederate veterans of the war. To achieve that goal, they downplayed the causes and consequences of the conflict. Instead, they made it seem as if the deaths of 750,000 Americans had stemmed from little more than a dispute over principle in which both sides sought to uphold righteous and noble ideals. As the nineteenth century reached its end, reconciliation became the dominant narrative of the Civil War in U.S. popular culture. Even so, African Americans and others committed to civil rights insisted on remembering the Civil War as a crucial moment in the struggle to create a more equal society, and as the centennial of the Civil War approached, they employed the memory of the war as a historical foundation for the Civil Rights Movement. L15 Historical Memory In this lesson, we will consider how competing narratives of the Civil War emerged and evolved and how they were used to address contemporary political and social issues. We will be examining what scholars call “historical memory.” Historical memoryrefers to the ways in which groups construct and identify with particular narratives about the past. These narratives are important aspects of social and political identity and often these narratives shift in relation to current events. Historical memory takes many forms, and it exists all around us. Our national currency presents a particular vision of the American past, one that centers on presidents and other political leaders like George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and Abraham Lincoln. Public monuments and statues stand on nearly every public square in the nation, commemorating people and events from local, state, and national history. These are all forms of historical memory, and they contribute to a shared narrative about the history of the United States. General Custer’s death struggle. National Mall, Washington DC. Lincoln Memorial forefront, Washington Monument midpoint, Capitol Building in the distance. Alternately, we could think about the National Mall in Washington, DC. Stretching from the U.S. Capitol building to the Lincoln Memorial, the National Mall commemorates a number of people and events from U.S. history. At the turn of the twentieth century, the Mall was designed “to forever symbolize the pageant of American history” and to serve as a place “where citizens would receive instruction from noble monuments, museums, and sculpture.”1 Because the Mall was intended to be a place where Americans would learn about U.S. history, the selection of the monuments is revealing. The 1902 plan to formalize the Mall imagined it as a monument to post-Civil War reconciliation featuring a statue of Ulysses S. Grant, the Lincoln Memorial, and a bridge to Alexandria, Virginia, physically linking the North and the South. Over time, more monuments and statues honoring presidents and commemorating military service were added. Yet, the meaning of the Mall has also changed from its origins in the segregated Progressive Era, as it now features a monument to civil rights leaders Martin Luther King, Jr. and museums of African American and Native American history. As we examine the use of historical memory related to the Civil War, keep in mind the relationship between narratives about the past and the contemporary context in which those ideas gained prominence.           1Edith L. B. Turner, “The People’s Home Ground,” in The National Mall: Rethinking Washington’s Monumental Core (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 70. L15 Reconciliation During the decades following the Civil War, veterans of the conflict remained committed to their respective causes. Northern politicians – and especially Union veterans – employed the rhetoric of the “Bloody Shirt” to highlight the sacrifice of U.S. soldiers in preserving the nation. White southerners embraced the “Lost Cause,” which presented their war as patriotic and their service as noble. During the era of Reconstruction, both of these ideologies were crucial to political fights over the role of the federal government and its authority over state and local affairs. Starting in the 1880s, as a new generation of Americans came of age, more and more white Americans attempted to bridge the divide between North and South by highlighting a memory of the Civil War that centered on reconciliation between white Americans of all regions. They sought to put behind them the issues of slavery, secession, and civil rights and focus instead on building an industrial economy and a global empire. A key part of reconciliation was to strip the war of its political and social significance. In 1884, Century Magazine began publishing a special magazine, Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, which soon attracted 225,000 subscribers and spawned an expanded four-volume set of books. Battles and Leaders avoided politics and ignored both the causes and the consequences of the war. Instead, the series featured essays from veterans, including high-ranking officers from both armies, detailing their experiences in particular battles. These illustrated accounts relayed stories of battlefield glory and heroism among Union and Confederate troops alike. Battles and Leaders was designed to further reconciliation. In the nearly twenty years since Appomattox, its publisher explained, “the passions and prejudices of the Civil War have nearly faded out of politics.” At such a remove, “its heroic events are passing into our common history where motives will be weighed without malice, and valor praised without distinction of uniform.” From that perspective, a younger generation, which had grown up after the war, “may now be taught how the men who were divided on a question of principle and State fealty … won by equal devotion and valor that respect for each other which is the strongest bond of a reunited people.”2 In short, Battles and Leaders avoided political questions in favor of tales of military bravery and sought to emphasize the similarity of experiences on both sides of the war. Battles and Leaders, one the editors later stated, was “a monument to American bravery, persistence, and resourcefulness.” He continued, “We rightly judged that articles celebrating the skill and valor of both sides would hasten the elimination of sectional prejudices and contribute toward reuniting the country by the cultivation of mutual respect.”3 2“Battles and Leaders of the Civil War,” Century Magazine 28 (Oct. 1884): 943-944.3Robert Underwood Johnson, Remembered Yesterdays (Boston: Little, Brown, 1923), 208. L15 Blue-Gray Reunions When the 4-volume set of Battles and Leaders appeared, it included a preface, which briefly described the series’ origin and its impact. The editors stated: “Coincident with the progress of the series during the past three years, may be noted a marked increase in the number of fraternal meetings between Union and Confederate veterans, enforcing the conviction that the nation is restored in spirit as in fact.”4 Although the editors of Battles and Leaders may have overstated their role in the prevalence of Blue-Gray reunions, such events did occur across the United States during the late 1800s and early 1900s. They, too, contributed to the narrative of reconciliation. Peace reunion camp of the Blue and Gray, 50th anniversary Battle of Gettysburg, Gettysburg, Pa., July 1st to 4th, 1913 Blue-Gray reunions could be complicated affairs, as organizers on both sides interpreted them as evidence that their cause was justified. For the Union veterans who supported these mixed reunions, it made perfect sense to include the South, because after all, reunion had been the principal goal of the war. Being honored for their courage and bravery, Southerners recognized part of the “Lost Cause” mythology and took it as a sign that they were no longer considered traitors. Moreover, Confederate participants argued that because their cause had represented the true ideals of the United States – liberty, states’ rights, etc. – it made sense for them to participate in a national commemoration of the war. Behind the scenes, veterans sometimes grumbled about the pageantry surrounding these mixed reunions. Before the 1895 dedication of the Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park, one Confederate veteran wrote a friend that he had attempted to avoid involvement in the affair but being unable to do so, his plan was “to set the Confederate before the world, briefly, as eating no dirt but still bowing to the inevitable – but raising his head afterward and keeping it up ever since.”5 Veterans expressed similar sentiments from the stage as well. A speaker from Michigan warned, “no mawkish sentiment should confuse the right or palliate the wrong.” Another from Nebraska, paraphrased Ulysses S. Grant, stating, “we, who fought to save, were forever right and they, who fought to destroy, were eternally wrong.”6 But, if the veterans remained committed to their view of the war, that’s not how the general public viewed Blue-Gray reunions. A widely-circulated newspaper account about the Blue-Gray reunion that accompanied the 1895 dedication at Chickamauga and Chattanooga proclaimed that, because of such events, “the Mason and Dixon line has been wiped off the map.”7 4“Preface,” in Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, 4 vols. (New York: Century, 1887), 1:ix.5Quoted in Caroline E. Janney, Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 191.6Quoted in Janney, Remembering the Civil War, 192.7“There is No Longer a Line,” Salt Lake Herald, 19 September 1895. L15 The Spanish-American War In 1898, the U.S. declared war on Spain after an American battleship exploded in the harbor of Havana, Cuba, which was still a Spanish colony. The Spanish-American War became another moment of reconciliation between North and South. Many southerners jumped at the opportunity to demonstrate their loyalty to the United States. As one man wrote to President William McKinley, “I do want you know and appreciate what a true Southerner and Mississippian is and with what loyalty they can and will support the Union now and forever.”8 McKinley – himself a Union veteran – seized on the opportunity, appointing former Confederate generals Fitzhugh Lee and Joseph Wheeler as major-generals of U.S. volunteers. They joined northerners to fight as a reunited nation. Soon, the soldiers who died in Cuba became symbols of reconciliation. One of the first Americans to die in the war was Worth Bagley, a North Carolinian and the son of a Confederate veteran. The New York Tribune proclaimed, “There is no north and no south … we are all Worth Bagley’s countrymen.”9 At the end of the year, President McKinley declared, “Sectional lines no longer mar the United States. Sectional feeling no longer holds back the love we bear.” In recognition of “our love and loyalty, our devotion and sacrifice,” McKinley promised that the U.S. would take responsibility for tending to the graves of all Civil War dead, including those of Confederates.10             8Quoted in Janney, Remembering the Civil War, 223.9Quoted in Janney, Remembering the Civil War, 228.10Quoted in Janney, Remembering the Civil War, 228. L15 The Lost Cause At the end of the nineteenth century, reconciliation had become the dominant narrative of the Civil War. Battles and Leaders, Blue-Gray reunions, and the Spanish-American War had all contributed to the emergence of this particular memory of a war in which neither side was right or wrong but both fought with bravery and honor. Even so, reconciliation never erased competing ideas about the Civil War and Reconstruction. Indeed, reconciliation offered an opening for the Lost Cause to enter the mainstream of U.S. culture. As long as northerners insisted on the fact that they were the right side, there was a counterweight to the Lost Cause memory. Once the veterans retired from public life or died, the new generation of northern leaders was less committed to those ideas, and some aspects of the Lost Cause were adopted into the narrative of reconciliation. Rewriting History In the aftermath of the Civil War, former Confederates recognized that they needed to revise the history of the war to rehabilitate their cause. In 1873, former Confederate general Jubal A. Early offered a clear statement of why Confederates had to write their own histories of the war. “We cannot escape the ordeal of history,” he proclaimed. “Before its bar we must appear, either as criminals – rebels and traitors seeking to thrown off the authority of a legitimate government … or as patriots defending our rights and vindicating the true principles of the government founded by our fathers.” Confederates, he declared, needed “to vindicate the honor and glory of our cause in the history of the struggle made in its defence.”11 In the decades that followed, groups like Early’s Southern Historical Society and the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) waged a campaign to rescue the Confederacy from charges of treason and disloyalty. Between 1876 and 1959, the Southern Historical Society Papers included more than 50 volumes of essays by CSA participants in the war giving their accounts of what happened. These writings helped enshrine the Lost Cause memory of the war. At the same time, the UDC focused on educating white southerners, especially children, with their particular version of Civil War history. They donated pro-Confederate books to southern schools and placed portraits of Confederate leaders in classrooms. Statues and Monuments The UDC and similar groups also erected statues and other monuments to Confederate veterans across the South. Their activities peaked in the first two decades of the 1900s, following in the immediate aftermath of the Supreme Court’s Plessy v. Ferguson ruling, which legalized racial segregation across the country. At their dedications, these statues were often linked with white supremacy. At the 1913 dedication of a Confederate monument at the University of North Carolina, a local civic and business leader proclaimed that the “courage and steadfastness” of the soldiers honored by the statue had “saved the very life of the Anglo Saxon race in the South.”12 The unveiling of the Confederate Monument Silent Sam at the University of North Carolina on June 2, 1913. In another instance, one UDC leader suggested that a proposed monument to Confederate leaders should also include depictions of the Ku Klux Klan to acknowledge their role in undermining Reconstruction. In the minds of the people who erected these statues, the causes of the Confederacy and white supremacy were inseparable. Take a few moments to look over the graph “Whose Heritage? 153 Years of Confederate Iconography” (PDF) put together by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Notice the spike in the construction of Confederate monuments from 1900 to 1920 (and then again from 1954 to 1968). Although couched in statements that the histories they were presenting were “truthful” or “authentic,” Lost Cause narratives were deeply partisan and political.13 Even those accounts that stuck to the battlefield were often crafted with political goals in mind. This trend is most apparent in Confederate accounts of Gettysburg, which absolve Robert E. Lee of any fault and place the blame for the rebel defeat in Pennsylvania at the feet of his subordinate, James Longstreet. One account in the Southern Historical Society Papers declared that “if General Lee’s orders had been properly carried out at Gettysburg, we would have won that field, crushed General Meade’s army, rescued Maryland, captured Washington and Baltimore, and dictated terms of peace on Northern Soil.”14 The author contended that the Confederacy would have won the battle and independence except for the failure of Longstreet to execute Lee’s orders. This narrative of Gettysburg performed two tasks central to the Lost Cause. First, it rendered Lee an infallible commander who was not defeated by the Union. Second, it tarnished the military reputation of James Longstreet, who, in the minds of many rebels, had betrayed his cause by becoming a Republican after the Civil War. In this view of the war, the Confederacy would have prevailed if the cause had not been undermined by a man with a questionable commitment to the rebellion. 11Jubal A. Early, “Address to the Southern Historical Convention,” 14 August 1873, in The Proceedings of the Southern Historical Convention … on the 14th of August, 1873(Baltimore: Turnbull Brothers, 1873), 27-28.12Julian S. Carr, “Unveiling of Confederate Monument at University. June 2, 1913,” Julian Shakespeare Carr Papers, Southern Historical Collection, The Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Available at https://finding-aids.lib.unc.edu/00141/#folder_26#1.13Karen L. Cox, Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003), 39; Early, “Address to the Southern Historical Convention,” 38.14“‘Within a Stone’s Throw of Independence’ at Gettysburg,” Southern Historical Society Papers 12 (March 1884): 111. L15 The Birth of a Nation During the early twentieth century, popular accounts of the Civil War often combined the reconciliationist narrative that emphasized bravery on both sides with heavy Confederate overtones. Never was that truer than in the case of D.W. Griffith’s 1915 film, The Birth of a Nation. Based on a best-selling novel called The Clansman (1905) by North Carolinian Thomas Dixon, The Birth of a Nation blamed abolitionists for the start of the war, acknowledged the bravery of soldiers on both sides, and condemned Reconstruction as an era of misrule and corruption in the South. In particular, the film depicted African Americans as violent, dangerous, and unsuited for positions of power. The heroes of the film were the Ku Klux Klan, which Griffith depicted as rescuing white southerners – especially white southern women – from the threats and dangers posed by empowered African Americans. The Birth of a Nation was an enormous hit, and it gained praise from American political and cultural leaders. But, more importantly in many respects, it made millions of dollars. The Birth of a Nation is reported to have been the highest-grossing motion picture of all time until it was displaced by another epic film of the Civil War and Reconstruction: Gone with the Wind (1939). Legacies The Birth of a Nation had two important legacies. First, The Birth of a Nation sparked a national protest campaign by African Americans and their allies against the racism shown in the movie. Between 1915 and 1917, hundreds of black churches, social groups, and civil rights organizations mobilized tens of thousands of black protestors to rally against the depictions of African Americans in Griffith’s film. By the end of 1915, black Americans protested the film in at least sixty cities across the United States. This response to The Birth of a Nation was driven by the fact that people understood that the film was not simply entertainment. As film critic Francis Hackett explained, the film was not simply a “spectacle.” It was an interpretation of the Civil War and Reconstruction that was “aggressively vicious and defamatory,” particularly toward African Americans. The effect of the film, Hackett concluded, “is to arouse in the audience a strong sense of the evil possibilities of the negro and the extreme propriety and godliness of the Ku Klux Klan.”15 By condemning Reconstruction and praising white Americans uniting against African Americans, The Birth of a Nation offered a justification for continued racial segregation. The other important legacy of The Birth of the Nation is that it inspired William J. Simmons, an Atlanta businessman, to reorganize the Ku Klux Klan. On the night of Thanksgiving 1915, Simmons and fifteen fellow Klansmen announced their group with a cross burning at Stone Mountain, an enormous granite geological formation outside Atlanta, which would soon be the site of a massive Confederate monument. The reestablished Klan embraced the white supremacist politics of its predecessor, while also adopting anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic, and anti-immigrant stances. By the early 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan had between 1.5 million and 4 million members across the country. Additionally, the film provoked multiple incidents of racial violence, including anti-black riots in Boston, Philadelphia, and elsewhere and the murder of an African American teenager in Lafayette, Indiana. The embrace of the film by white supremacists revealed that the concerns of African Americans had been well-founded. 15Francis Hackett, “Brotherly Love,” The New Republic 2 (March 20, 1915): 185. L15 The Propaganda of History The response to The Birth of a Nation also reveals that the memory of the Civil War and Reconstruction remained contested, even as many white Americans accepted the version of that story promoted by D.W. Griffith and others. In their protests against the film, African Americans often called back to other stories from the Civil War era, especially the military service of nearly 200,000 black soldiers and sailors and the legacy of emancipation. On April 14, 1915, an African American man stood up in a screening of the film in New York City and shouted, “On the anniversary of Lincoln’s assassination … it is inappropriate to present a play that libels 10,000,000 loyal American negroes. I think that President Lincoln wouldn’t like this play.”16 In Chicago, city police attacked protestors who had gathered to oppose the film. The city’s famous African American newspaper, the Defender, praised the protestors for demonstrating bravery “like their fathers in the civil war.”17 Black Reconstruction W.E.B. Du Bois, photograph, 1918. Scholar and activist W.E.B. Du Bois often countered the Lost Cause narrative of the Civil War in his writings, both in as editor of The Crisis, the magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and as author of the classic Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880 (1935). In the final chapter of Black Reconstruction, Du Bois condemned the memories of the Civil War popular among white Americans as distorted and misleading. Such narratives downplayed the importance of slavery as a cause of the war. They skimmed over Reconstruction “with a phrase of regret or disgust.”18 White writers had prioritized “the unsupported evidence of men who hated and despised Negroes” and highlighted the “most unfair caricatures of Negroes,” while ignoring plentiful evidence to the contrary. As Du Bois stated, “The chief witness in Reconstruction, the emancipated slave himself, has been almost barred from the court.”19 According to Du Bois, such accounts of the Civil War era provided “a false but pleasurable sense of accomplishment” and told a story in which “nobody seems to have done wrong and everybody was right.” These narratives had been constructed in a way that smoothed over the strife and tensions of the Civil War era. But, as Du Bois, stated, these were not the objective histories they claimed to be. Instead, they were propaganda which inflated “our national ego.”20 Gone with the Wind The criticisms made by Du Bois and others of the Lost Cause and reconciliation narratives of the Civil War took decades to penetrate the mainstream of U.S. society. Within a few months of Du Bois publishing Black Reconstruction, Margaret Mitchell published her novel, Gone with the Wind, which drew upon the Lost Cause histories of slavery and Reconstruction to tell a story of white southerners’ resilience in the face of oppression from the federal government and threats from emancipated African Americans. In its first year, Du Bois’s book sold fewer than 400 copies. Gone with the Wind sold nearly 1 million copies in the last six months of 1936 and spawned the most successful movie in the history of cinema. Following its 1939 release, the film version of Gone With the Wind sold an estimated 200 million tickets in the U.S. and Canada and generated a box office return of $390 million (more than $3 billion in current dollars). 16Quoted in Cara Caddoo, Envisioning Freedom: Cinema and the Building of Modern Black Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 148.17Quoted in Caddoo, Envisioning Freedom, 158.18W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880 (1935; paperback, New York: Free Press, 1998), 714.19Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 721, 725.20Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 714. L15 The Confederate Battle Flag During the middle of the twentieth century, contests over the memory of the Civil War era came to the forefront of U.S. society. During World War II, civil rights activists had called for a Double V campaign – victory over fascism abroad and racism at home. In the post-World War II era, the push for civil rights began to attract broad support. During this era, the national Democratic Party increasingly moved away from the segregationist policies they had supported in earlier decades. In 1947, Democratic President Harry Truman initiated a federal commission on Civil Rights, and the next year he integrated the U.S. armed forces. He also advocated a federal ban on poll taxes and federal anti-lynching legislation. Dixiecrats These moves prompted southern Democrats to split with the northern wing of their party in the presidential election of 1948. That year, South Carolina segregationist Strom Thurmond ran for president as the nominee of the States’ Rights Democratic Party, popularly known as the Dixiecrats. Using language borrowed from Lost Cause attacks on Reconstruction, the Dixiecrat platform announced its opposition to racial integration by declaring, “We favor home-rule, local self-government and a minimum interference with individual rights.”21 The Dixiecrats carried four states in the 1948 elections – Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina – and laid the groundwork for the exodus of southern Democrats to the Republican Party during the 1960s and 1970s. The Dixiecrats also played an important role in shaping popular perceptions of the Confederacy and the Civil War. At the Dixiecrat convention in July 1948, delegates marched into the hall carrying Confederate battle flags. Soon, it was ubiquitous at Dixiecrat campaign rallies. Up to that point, the use of the Confederate battle flag had largely been restricted to events held by heritage groups like the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Sons of Confederate Veterans and – oddly – at college football games in the Deep South. With the Dixiecrat campaign, it became a widely-used political symbol. As historian John Coski explained, “Once again, in the 1940s as in the 1860s, the Confederate battle flag was the chosen symbol of people dedicated to defending states’ rights as a means to preserve a social order founded upon white supremacy.”22 Resurgence of the Flag As the Confederate battle flag became associated with segregationist politics, demand for it skyrocketed. Indicating the flag’s relative absence in popular culture before 1948, a Florida woman wrote the Dixiecrats following their convention asking where she could purchase a flag, noting that she had not been able to find one in her city. Soon, stores across the South reported an enormous market for these flags. A Dallas store claimed that sales of Confederate battle flags had increased three-thousand percent. Another in Richmond, Virginia, reported a ten-thousand percent increase. Some flag dealers attributed the boom directly to the Dixiecrat campaign against Truman and integration. According to John Coski, “the [Dixiecrat] campaign … made the flag a fixture in places where it had been only a novelty before.”23 The trend continued as the Civil Rights Movement gained support. In 1956, the state of Georgia revised its state flag to include the Confederate battle flag. Two years later, it purchased Stone Mountain and funded the completion of an enormous bas-relief sculpture of Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and Stonewall Jackson, which had been started in 1916. The monument was completed in 1972. 21Platform of the States’ Rights Democratic Party, 14 August 1948. Available at https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/platform-the-states-rights-democratic-party. 22John M. Coski, The Confederate Battle Flag: America’s Most Embattled Emblem(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 98.23Coski, The Confederate Battle Flag, 107. L15 The Civil War & Civil Rights In the early 1960s, the Civil Rights Movement intersected with the Civil War centennial, a moment when Americans across the country looked back to the Civil War era for a variety of reasons, both historical and political. We can clearly see the connections between the Civil Rights Movement and Civil War memory in the example of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. It was no coincidence that the event culminated with speeches and performances on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. The march’s organizers even put spotlights inside the memorial, illuminating the statue of Lincoln so it would be visible from the Mall. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, addresses marchers during his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, 1963. At that event, Martin Luther King, Jr. began his famous “I Have a Dream” speech with a reference to Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation: “Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation.” This event, King said, “came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice.” Yet, he continued, “one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free.” African Americans, King stated, remained “crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination.”24 King used the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation as the historical context for his call for equal rights for all Americans. He explicitly linked the struggles for abolition and civil rights of the 1860s to the quest for equality in the 1960s. Elsewhere, he made that connection even more explicit. In 1962, he penned an open letter to President John F. Kennedy, which stated, “The struggle for freedom, Mr. President, of which the Civil War was but a bloody chapter, continues throughout our land today. The courage and heroism of Negro citizens at Montgomery, Little Rock, New Orleans, Prince Edward County, and Jackson, Mississippi is only a further effort to affirm the democratic heritage so painfully won, in part, upon the grassy battlefields of Antietam, Lookout Mountain, and Gettysburg.”25 By connecting the Civil Rights Movement to a longer struggle for equality, King and others undercut arguments that the Civil Rights Movement was moving too quickly or demanding too much, too fast. Linking their movement to Abraham Lincoln and emancipation allowed them to provide a larger historical framework for understanding the quest for equality as a longstanding fight, not a recent development. 24Martin Luther King, Jr., “‘I Have a Dream,’ Address Delivered at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom,” 28 August 1963. Available at https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/i-have-dream-address-delivered-march-washington-jobs-and-freedom. 25Quoted in David W. Blight, American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era(Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011), 17. L15 The Civil War Centennial Even as the Civil Rights Movement reclaimed the emancipationist legacy of the 1860s, other memories of the Civil War remained deeply ingrained in the American – and especially, white American – psyche. Segregationists clung to Lost Cause ideals and condemned attempts to commemorate emancipation as contrary to the “true events of history.”26 White northerners promoted narratives of reconciliation. As historian David Blight has written, “In 1963, the national temper and mythology still preferred a story of the mutual valor of the Blue and Gray to the troublesome, disruptive problem of black and white.”27 The comfortable myths of reconciliation were hard to dislodge. In their explorations of the memory of the Civil War, some writers found explanations for contemporary responses to the Civil Rights Movement. Kentuckian Robert Penn Warren – the celebrated novelist, essayist, and poet laureate of the United States – examined these issues in his 1961 book, The Legacy of the Civil War. Warren argued that white Americans’ views of the Civil War had largely been clouded by two myths: The Great Alibi of the South and the Treasury of Virtue in the North. By the era of the centennial, these two ideas had become so enmeshed in American culture that they shaped responses to “our personal present.”28 The Great Alibi The Great Alibi was Warren’s name for the Lost Cause. It alleged that the Confederacy had been a noble cause and had never truly been defeated, simply overwhelmed by superior numbers, as Robert E. Lee famously put it. Warren stated: By the Great Alibi the South explains, condones, and transmutes everything. … Even now, any common lyncher becomes a defender of the Southern tradition, and any rabble-rouser the gallant leader of a thin gray line.”29 White southerners opposing integrated schools in Alabama, Arkansas, or Louisiana could “in relative safety of mob anonymity” scream “howling vituperation” at African American children walking to school and “feel himself at one with those gaunt, barefoot, whiskery scarecrows who fought it out, breast to breast, to the death at the Bloody Angle at Spotsylvania.”30 In short, through the Great Alibi, white southerners justified all opposition to segregation as continuing the legacy of their Confederate ancestors. Treasury of Virtue If white southerners found comfort in the Great Alibi, their northern counterparts did the same with the Treasury of Virtue, which provided them with a “plenary indulgence, for all sins past, present, and future.”31 White northerners could feel satisfied that they had been on the moral side of the conflict and had abolished slavery. As Warren pointed out, this “happy contemplation” ignored widespread resistance to emancipation and civil rights in the Civil War-era North.32 Through its caricature of white northerners as antislavery crusaders, the Treasury of Virtue allowed white northerners to cast aspersions on segregationists in the South while they insulated themselves “from democratic hurlyburly into penthouse, suburb, or private school” and ignored inequality and segregation in northern cities.33 Indeed, such a worldview shaped white northerners’ responses to the Civil Rights Movement as its focus shifted northward during the middle of the 1960s. As organizers began calling for desegregation in housing and schools in northern cities, they faced a powerful and sometimes violent backlash in the courts and in the streets. Decades later, northern cities like Cleveland, Detroit, Milwaukee, and Boston remain deeply segregated. 26Quoted in Blight, American Oracle, 18.27Blight, American Oracle, 3.28Robert Penn Warren, The Legacy of the Civil War (1961; paperback, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), 101.29Warren, Legacy of the Civil War, 54.30Warren, Legacy of the Civil War, 59.31Warren, Legacy of the Civil War, 59.32Warren, Legacy of the Civil War, 60.33Warren, Legacy of the Civil War, 70. L15 Summary A century after the end of the Civil War, the historical memory of the conflict remained deeply contested. Competing narratives of the Civil War emphasized the nobility of the defeated Confederacy, praised the honor and bravery of all soldiers regardless of uniform, or identified the struggle for emancipation as a precursor to contemporary demands for equality. These narratives shifted and evolved depending upon context, and their popularity waxed and waned as circumstances changed. Disputes over these narratives are still salient in the present-day United States. Americans have debated the appropriate place of Confederate monuments and flags – tributes to a traitorous rebellion in defense of slavery – in a nation that professes a belief in equality and liberty. As more and more Americans have decided that these icons of secession, slavery, and segregation should be removed, defenders of the Lost Cause have turned to legislation, lawsuits, and even violence to keep them in place. To make sense of these contemporary issues, we have to understand that they are part of a long conflict over the meaning and legacy of the Civil War. Table of Contents Preface xvii Part 1: The Sectional Conflict The North and South Contrasted The Rush of Life in New York City (1857) (1) Aleksandr Borisovich Lakier Anonymous, the Manufacturing City of Lowell (1847) (1) I Will Be Heard (1831) (2) William Lloyd Garrison Declaration of Sentiments of the American Anti-Slavery Convention (1833) (2) The South’s Lack of a Spirit of Progress (1861) (2) Frederick Law Olmsted We Are an Agricultural People (1861) 11 (1) Louis T. Wigfall Slavery Impedes the Progress and Prosperity of the South (1857) 12 (2) Hinton Rowan Helper Why Non-Slaveholders Should Support Slavery (1861) 14 (2) J. D. B. De Bow Anonymous, A Traveler Describes the Lives of Non-Slaveholders in Georgia (1849) 16 (2) Slavery is the Cause of Civilization (1838) 18 (3) William Harper The New Orleans Slave Mart (1853) 21 (2) Solomon Northup Frederick Douglass Fights a Slave-Breaker (1845) 23 (4) The House Dividing I Plead the Cause of White Freemen (1847) 27 (1) David Wilmot The South is at Your Mercy (1847) 28 (1) Howell Cobb The Cords of Union Are Snapping One by One (1850) 29 (2) John C. Calhoun I Speak Today for the Preservation of the Union (1850) 31 (2) Daniel Webster Appeal of the Independent Democrats (1854) 33 (2) New York Times, the Causes of the Know-Nothing Movement (1854) 35 (2) Mobile Register, the South Asks Only for Equal Rights in the Territories (1856) 37 (1) New York Evening, Are We Too Slaves? (1856) 38 (2) Richmond Enquirer, They Must Be Lashed into Submission (1856) 40 (1) Rules against Dred Scott (1857) 41 (2) Chief Justice Roger B. Taney Dissents in the Dred Scott Case (1857) 43 (3) Associate Justice Benjamin R. Curtis Cotton is King (1858) 46 (1) James Henry Hammond The Lincoln-Douglas Debates (1858) 47 (4) The Freeport Doctrine (1858) 51 (1) Addresses the Court (1859) 52 (1) John Brown Richmond Enquirer, the Harpers Ferry Invasion Has Advanced the Cause of Disunion (1859) 53 (1) I Have Seen Nothing Like the Intensity of Feeling (1859) 54 (3) Charles Eliot Norton The Road to War The South Must Strike while There is Yet Time (1860) 57 (1) Robert Toombs Lincoln’s Election Does Not Justify Secession (1860) 58 (2) Alexander H. Stephens South Carolina Justifies Secession (1860) 60 (2) I Hold That the Union is Perpetual (1861) 62 (3) Abraham Lincoln The Outbreak of War Galvanizes New York City (1861) 65 (2) George Templeton Strong The Popular Mood in Charleston at the Start of the Civil War (1861) 67 (4) William Howard Russell Part 2: The Civil War The War Begins Slavery is the Cornerstone of the Confederacy (1861) 71 (1) Alexander H. Stephens Our Cause is Just (1861) 72 (2) Jefferson Davis This is a People’s Contest (1861) 74 (2) Abraham Lincoln The Resources of the Union and the Confederacy (1861) 76 (1) Calls for Troops (1861) 77 (1) Abraham Lincoln Institutes a Blockade of the Confederacy (1861) 78 (1) Abraham Lincoln Kentucky Declares Its Neutrality (1861) 79 (1) The Raccoon Roughs Go to War (1903) 80 (1) John B. Gordon The London Times Foresees a Confederate Victory in the War (1861) 81 (2) The Military Struggle, 1861–1862 The Anaconda Plan (1861) 83 (1) Winfield Scott The Most Shameful Rout You Can Conceive Of (1861) 84 (2) Lyman Trumbull I Have Become the Power in the Land (1861) 86 (1) George McClellan The President is Nothing More Than a Well Meaning Baboon (1861) 87 (1) George McClellan Explains His Ideas on Military Strategy (1862) 88 (1) Abraham Lincoln An lowa Soldier “Sees the Elephant” at Shiloh (1862) 89 (3) Cyrus F. Boyd I Gave Up All Idea of Saving the Union Except by Complete Conquest (1885) 92 (1) Ulysses S. Grant But You Must Act (1862) 93 (1) Abraham Lincoln You Have Done Your Best to Sacrifice This Army (1862) 94 (1) George McClellan The War Should Be Conducted upon the Highest Principles of Christian Civilization (1862) 95 (2) George McClellan Adopts Harsher Policies against Southern Civilians (1862) 97 (2) John Pope Authorizes the Army to Seize Private Property in the Confederacy (1862) 99 (1) Abraham Lincoln Proposes to Invade the North (1862) 100 (1) Robert E. Lee General Edward Alexander Criticizes Lee at Antietam (1899) 101 (2) The Most Dreadful Slaughter (1890) 103 (2) Rufus R. Dawes Harper’s Weekly, Northern Despair after the Battle of Fredericksburg (1862) 105 (2) The Naval War The Monitor Challenges the Merrimack (1862) 107 (1) G. J. Van Burnt The United States Navy Blockades the Confederacy (1898) 108 (3) Horatio Wait Aboard a Blockade-Runner (1896) 111 (4) Thomas Taylor Union Politics, 1861-1862 Encounters the Contrabands (1892) 115 (2) Benjamin F. Butler The Crittenden Resolution Defines Union War Aims (1861) 117 (1) Cast Off the Mill-Stone (1861) 117 (2) Frederick Douglass To Lose Kentucky is to Lose the Whole Game (1861) 119 (2) Abraham Lincoln A Democratic Congressman Attacks Emancipation (1862) 121 (3) Samuel S. Cox Supports for Emancipation is Increasing (1862) 124 (1) John Sherman I Would Save the Union (1862) 125 (1) Abraham Lincoln Harper’s Weekly Gauges the Northern Response to Emancipation (1862) 126 (1) New York Times, the 1862 Elections Are a Repudiation of the Administration’s Conduct of the War (1862) 127 (2) Replies to a Republican Critic after the 1862 Elections (1862) 129 (2) Abraham Lincoln Confederate Politics, 1861-1863 Governor Joseph Brown Obstructs Conscription in Georgia (1862) 131 (1) The Twenty Negro Law (1862) 132 (1) A Georgia Soldier Condemns the Exemption of Slaveholders (1862) 133 (2) An Atlanta Paper Defends the Exemption of Slaveholders (1862) 135 (1) Defends His Policies (1862) 136 (2) Jefferson Davis Richmond Examiner, A Richmond Paper Calls for a Tax-in-Kind (1863) 138 (2) A Richmond Editor Denounces Davis’s Leadership (1869) 140 (3) Edward Pollard Diplomacy Anonymous, Southerners’ Faith in King Cotton Diplomacy (1861) 143 (1) The Trent Affair Has Almost Wrecked Us (1862) 144 (1) Charles Francis Adams Complains of Europe’s Refusal to Recognize the Confederacy (1863) 145 (1) Jefferson Davis This is War (1863) 145 (2) Charles Francis Adams The Military Struggle, 1863 Counsels General Joseph Hooker (1863) 147 (1) Abraham Lincoln The Character of the War Has Very Much Changed (1863) 148 (1) Henry Halleck Proposes to Take the Offensive (1863) 149 (2) Robert E. Lee A Pennsylvania Woman Encounters Lee’s Army (1863) 151 (3) Rachel Cormany A Virginia Soldier Survives Pickett’s Charge (1863) 154 (2) John Dooley A Connecticut Soldier Helps Repel Pickett’s Charge (1863) 156 (3) Benjamin Hirst Anonymous, Daily Life during the Siege of Vicksburg (1863) 159 (3) The Conduct of the Negroes Was beyond All Expression (1863) 162 (1) Alexander S. Abrams The Confederacy Totters to Its Destruction (1863) 163 (2) Josiah Gorgas Union Politics, 1863 The Emancipation Proclamation (1863) 165 (1) Abraham Lincoln Northern Newspapers Debate the Significance of the Emancipation Proclamation (1863) 166 (2) Harper’s Weekly, the Work Done by Congress (1863) 168 (2) One of the Worst Despotisms on Earth (1863) 170 (2) Clement Vallandigham I Think I Shall Be Blamed for Having Made Too Few Arrests (1863) 172 (3) Abraham Lincoln The Heaviest Blow Yet Dealt to the Rebellion (1863) 175 (2) Abraham Lincoln A New Birth of Freedom (1863) 177 (2) Abraham Lincoln The Union Home Front Conscription in the Union (1866) 179 (1) The New York Press Debates the Causes of the Draft Riots (1863) 180 (3) Jefferson Davis Rules New York Today (1863) 183 (2) George Templeton Strong This Country Also Belongs to Us (1863) 185 (2) J. W. C. Pennington Anonymous, A Rioter Condemns the $300 Commutation Fee (1863) 187 (1) The New York Evening Post Defends the $300 Commutation Fee (1863) 187 (2) A Union Nurse at Gettysburg (1863) 189 (1) Cornelia Hancock Harper’s Monthly, the Fortunes of War (1864) 190 (4) Fincher’s Trade Review, Working Women Protest Their Low Wages (1865) 194 (1) Harper’s Monthly, Wall Street in Wartime (1865) 195 (2) The Confederate Home Front Slavery is a Tower of Strength to the South (1861) 197 (1) Montgomery Advertiser Slave Owners Ought to Bear the Principal Burden of the War (1863) 198 (1) Samuel L. Holt “Agnes,” A Resident Observes the Richmond Bread Riot (1863) 199 (2) This is War, Terrible War (1862-1864) 201 (3) John B. Jones Phoebe Yates Pember Becomes a Hospital Matron (1879) 204 (1) Southern Women Enter the Government Bureaucracy (1867) 205 (1) Sally Putnam A Confederate General Reports on Widespread Resistance to Conscription (1863) 206 (2) Gideon J. Pillow The War Corrodes Female Virtue (1863) 208 (1) Daniel O’Leary A Union Officer Marvels at the Endurance of the Southern People (1864) 209 (1) Theodore Lyman Until Adversity Tries Us (1861-1865) 210 (4) Ella Gertrude Thomas Is Anything Worth It? (1862-1865) 214 (2) Mary Chesnut Dear Edward (1906) 216 (1) Mary Cooper The Revulsion Was Sickening (1865) 217 (2) Judith McGuire African Americans An Escaped Slave Writes His Wife from a Union Camp (1862) 219 (1) John Boston Frederick Douglass Urges Black Men to Enlist (1863) 220 (2) A Mother Calls on the Government to Protect Black Soldiers (1863) 222 (1) Hannah Johnson A Union General Describes Slaves Entering the Union Lines (1863) 223 (1) Lorenzo Thomas The Negroes Are Worse Than Free (1863) 224 (1) Susanna Clay A Black Soldier Explains His Motives for Fighting (1863) 225 (1) Isaiah H. Welch New York Times, A Prodigious Revolution (1864) 226 (1) Anonymous A Black Soldier Protests Unequal Pay (1864) 227 (2) A Black Soldier Writes His Daughter’s Owner (1864) 229 (1) Spotswood Rice The Hardship of Black Soldiers’ Families (1864) 230 (1) Rachel Ann Wicker Mittie Freeman Meets a Yankee (1937) 231 (1) Former Slaves Recall the End of Slavery (1937) 232 (2) The Slave Eliza Acquires a New Name (1937) 234 (1) Eliza Evans Common Soldiers The Comforts of a Soldier’s Life (1929) 235 (1) Randolph Shotwell Hard Marching (1863) 236 (1) Wilbur Fisk A South Carolina Soldier Confronts His Captain (1862) 237 (1) Samuel E. Burges Trading with the Enemy (1863) 238 (1) Tally Simpson Fraternization among Soldiers of the Two Armies (1864) 239 (1) Chauncey H. Cooke Religious Revivals in the Confederate Army (1864) 240 (1) T. J. Stokes Antiblack Prejudice in the Union Ranks (1897) 241 (1) John A. Potter A Union Soldier’s Changing Views on Emancipation (1863-1865) 242 (4) Chauncey Welton A Louisiana Soldier Links Slavery and Race to the Cause of the Confederacy (1862-1864) 246 (1) Reuben A. Pierson A Wounded Soldier Describes a Field Hospital (1863) 247 (1) T. D. Kingsley The Scourge of War (1862) 247 (2) William Fisher Plane The Military Struggle, 1864 Devises a New Union Strategy (1885) 249 (2) Ulysses S. Grant A Union Officer Depicts the Fury of the Fighting at Spotsylvania (1897) 251 (1) Horace Porter Our Numbers Are Daily Decreasing (1864) 252 (1) Robert E. Lee A Confederate Soldier Describes the Pressure of Fighting in the Trenches (1903) 253 (1) Robert Stiles War is Cruelty, and You Cannot Refine It (1864) 253 (2) William Tecumseh Sherman Proposes to March to the Sea (1864) 255 (1) William Tecumseh Sherman An Illinois Soldier Marches with Sherman to the Sea and Beyond (1864-1865) 256 (2) James Connolly The Heavens Were Lit with Flames (1864) 258 (3) Dolly Lunt Burge Union Politics, 1864 The New York Times is Amazed by the Change in Public Opinion on Slavery (1864) 261 (1) Party Platforms in 1864 262 (3) Events Have Controlled Me (1864) 265 (1) Abraham Lincoln Our Bleeding Country Longs for Peace (1864) 266 (1) Horace Greeley Outlines His Terms for Peace (1864) 267 (1) Abraham Lincoln The Tide is Setting Strongly against Us (1864) 268 (2) Henry J. Raymond Illinois State Register, A Negotiated Peace with the Confederacy is Possible (1864) 270 (1) New York Tribune, An Armistice Would Lead to a Southern Victory (1864) 271 (2) The Republican and Democratic Parties’ Final Appeal to the Voters (1864) 273 (2) A Democratic Soldier Votes for Lincoln (1891) 275 (1) J. N. Jones The Election Was a Necessity (1864) 276 (1) Abraham Lincoln Chicago Tribune, Lincoln’s Election is a Mandate to Abolish Slavery (1864) 277 (1) Hails the Passage of the Thirteenth Amendment (1865) 278 (3) Abraham Lincoln Confederate Politics, 1864-1865 Notes the Achievements of the Confederate Ordnance Bureau (1864) 281 (1) Josiah Gorgas Once Lost, Liberty is Lost Forever (1864) 282 (3) Alexander H. Stephens Richmond Examiner, We Are Fighting for Independence, Not Slavery (1864) 285 (1) Richmond Examiner, We Prefer the Law (1864) 286 (1) We Want No Confederacy without Slavery (1865) 287 (1) Charleston Mercury Richmond Enquirer, Slavery and the Cause of the Confederacy (1865) 288 (2) Opposition and Disloyalty Are Increasing Daily (1865) 290 (3) Howell Cobb The End of the War A Bleak Confederate Christmas (1864) 293 (1) Judith McGuire Reflects on the Situation of the Confederacy (1865) 294 (3) Catherine Edmondston Southerners Have Lost the Will to Resist (1865) 297 (1) George Ward Nichols Desertion Now is Not Dishonorable (1865) 298 (1) Luther Mills With Malice toward None (1865) 299 (1) Abraham Lincoln Bitter Tears Came in a Torrent (1865) 300 (2) Mary A. Fontaine Richmond’s Black Residents Welcome Abraham Lincoln (1897) 302 (1) A. W. Bartlett An Awed Stillness (1915) 303 (2) Joshua L. Chamberlain Describes Lincoln’s Death (1865) 305 (2) Gideon Welles Fires the Last Shot of the Civil War (1865) 307 (1) Edmund Ruffin A Confederate Soldier Reflects on the War’s Cost and Significance (1865) 308 (1) Samuel T. Foster A Confederate Nurse Discusses the Internal Causes of the Confederacy’s Defeat (1865) 309 (2) Kate Cumming A Confederate Official Analyzes the Causes of the Defeat of the Confederacy (1957) 311 (1) Robert Garlick Kean We Have No Future (1866) 312 (1) Sarah Hine We Have Lived a Century of Common Life (1865) 313 (1) George Templeton Strong New York Times, the War Touches Everything (1867) 314 (3) Part 3: Reconstruction Presidential Reconstruction Vetoes the Wade-Davis Bill (1864) 317 (1) Abraham Lincoln The Wade-Davis Manifesto (1864) 318 (1) Benjamin F. Wade Henry Winter Davis We Shall Have the Fowl Sooner by Hatching Than Smashing the Egg (1865) 319 (2) Abraham Lincoln Affirms the Loyalty of Southern Whites (1865) 321 (2) Ulysses S. Grant Questions Southern Whites’ Loyalty (1865) 323 (2) Carl Schurz The Mississippi Black Codes (1865) 325 (3) The Radicals Will Be Completely Foiled (1865) 328 (1) Andrew Johnson Petition for Suffrage (1865) 329 (1) Virginia Blacks Reports on the Success of His Program of Reconstruction (1865) 330 (3) Andrew Johnson Johnson’s Clash with Congress Designates the Southern States as Conquered Provinces (1865) 333 (2) Thaddeus Stevens Says Black Suffrage Will Lead to Race War in the South (1866) 335 (1) Andrew Johnson The Joint Committee Reports on the Status of the Former States of the Confederacy (1866) 336 (3) Vetoes the Civil Rights Bill (1866) 339 (3) Andrew Johnson The Chicago Tribune Blames Johnson for the New Orleans Riot (1866) 342 (2) Waves the Bloody Shirt (1866) 344 (2) Oliver P. Morton I Am Fighting Traitors in the North (1866) 346 (2) Andrew Johnson New York Times, the People’s Verdict (1866) 348 (3) Congressional Reconstruction Thaddeus Stevens’s Land Confiscation Bill (1867) 351 (1) Accuses Congress of Seeking to Africanize the South (1867) 352 (3) Andrew Johnson The Articles of Impeachment (1868) 355 (2) Defends Johnson in the Impeachment Trial (1868) 357 (3) William Evarts Appeals for Universal Suffrage (1869) 360 (2) Elizabeth Cady Stanton A Black Congressman Complains about Unequal Treatment (1874) 362 (2) James T. Rapier Equal Rights and Social Equality (1874) 364 (3) Richard Cain Political Reconstruction in the South Voice Their Aspirations for Equality (1867) 367 (2) Alabama Blacks South Carolina Democrats Protest against the New State Constitution (1868) 369 (2) An African American Leader Instructs New Black Voters (1867) 371 (1) R. I. Cromwell Who is Responsible for Corruption? (1870) 372 (2) Henry Clay Warmoth A Defense of Carpetbaggers (1875) 374 (3) Alexander White Economic and Social Reconstruction Former Slaves Are Anxious to Record Their Marriages (1865) 377 (1) A. B. Randall Southern Whites Have No Faith in Black Free Labor (1866) 378 (1) Sidney Andrews Freedpeople Complain about Their Former Owners’ Attempts to Cheat Them (1865) 379 (1) N. B. Lucas A Freedman Writes his Former Master (1865) 380 (2) Jourdon Anderson The Tribulations of a Freedmen’s Bureau Agent (1868) 382 (2) John W. DeForest New Orleans Tribune, They Are the Planter’s Guards (1867) 384 (1) The Contested Meaning of Freedom (1880) 385 (2) Henry Adams Planters Insist That Black Women Work in the Fields (1880) 387 (1) Henry Adams Two Black Workers Settle Accounts at the End of the Year (1867) 388 (1) Mariah Baldwin Ellen Latimer New Orleans Tribune, A Black Newspaper Calls for Integrated Schools in New Orleans (1867) 389 (2) A Sharecropping Contract (1886) 391 (2) Opposition and Northern Disillusionment Signals a Retreat from Reconstruction (1874) 393 (2) Ulysses S. Grant Society Turned Bottom-Side Up (1874) 395 (2) James S. Pike The Nation, This is Socialism (1874) 397 (3) South Carolina Black Leaders Defend the State Government’s Fiscal Record (1874) 400 (3) Vetoes the Currency Act (1874) 403 (2) Ulysses S. Grant The Blaine Amendment (1875) 405 (1) James G. Blaine The Public is Tired of These Outbreaks in the South (1875) 406 (2) Edwards Pierrepont The Mississippi Plan in Action (1876) 408 (1) James W. Lee The Assassination of an African American Political Leader (1876) 409 (2) Margaret Ann Caldwell A Southern White Leader Abandons the Republican Party (1913) 411 (2) James Lusk The End of Reconstruction Outlines His Southern Policy (1877) 413 (1) Rutherford B. Hayes Surrenders the Southern Carolina Governorship (1877) 414 (2) Governor Daniel Chamberlain Assesses the Mistakes of Reconstruction (1880) 416 (3) Frederick Douglass Appendix 1. United States Constitution 419 (10) 2. Confederate Constitution 429 (10) Permissions Acknowledgments 439