History Commons^™

"The Most Awful Problem That Any Nation Ever Undertook To Solve": Reconstruction As A Crisis In Citizenship, Allen C. Guelzo

Civil War Era Studies Faculty Publications

Reconstruction is the step-child of the Civil War, the black hole of American history. It lacks the conflict and the personalities that make the Civil War so colorful; it also lacks the climactic feuds and battles, and dissipates into a confusing and wearisome tale of lost opportunities, squalid victories, and embarrassing defeats whose ultimate endpoint is the great American disgrace - Jim Crow. It lives with the short end of the historical stick for accomplishing too much, then accomplishing too little, with the result that almost the worst thing that can be said about someone in American history is that …

Racial Exhaustion, Darren L. Hutchinson

Faculty Articles

This Article proceeds in three principle parts. Part II explains the role of rhetoric and narratives in shaping commonly held societal beliefs and argues that racial exhaustion discourse functions as a social script that seeks to portray the United States as a post-racist society. Part II then summarizes the basic content of racial exhaustion rhetoric and identifies five common arguments that have endured across historical contexts, which depict race-based remedies as redundant, taxing, injurious to whites, special handouts to blacks, and futile because law cannot alter racial inequality. Next, Part II examines the political rhetoric employed by nineteenth-century Congressional opponents …

Woods, Elizabeth Moseley, 1865-1967 (Mss 25), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

MSS Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Manuscripts Collection 25. Correspondence related to travel of Elizabeth Moseley Woods (1865-1967). Also includes Woods family correspondence, 100th birthday congratulations, Woods and Hall families genealogies, a household account book kept by Woods on a stay in Paris, 1901, and a script of a 1938 radio broadcast related to a South American cruise taken by Woods. Also includes clippings related to the retirement of Dr. John D. Woods as editor of the "Glasgow Times." An original and two copies of 1862 Civil letters (Confederate) are also included.

Cluskey, Michael Walsh, 1833?-1873 (Mss 23), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

MSS Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Manuscripts Collection 23. Correspondence and writings of Michael Walsh Cluskey, who was postmaster of the National House of Representaitves, 1851-1859; editor of Memphis Avalanche and Louisville Daily Ledger; and a Confederate soldier. The materials mainly relate to politics, published books, and newspaper work.

The American Civil War, Emancipation, And Reconstruction On The World Stage, Edward L. Ayers

History Faculty Publications

Americans demanded the world's attention during their Civil War and Reconstruction. Newspapers around the globe reported the latest news from the United States as one vast battle followed another, as the largest system of slavery in the world crashed into pieces, as American democracy expanded to include people who had been enslaved only a few years before.

Generations Later: Has Once-Remote Promise Of Freedom Been Fulfilled?, Edward L. Ayers

History Faculty Publications

Emancipation began with a flickering promise, burned intensely for a few years during Reconstruction, and then smoldered for a century. Equality and justice have come into view for most African-Americans only in the past two generations. For many descendants of slavery, those essential rights of a free people are still hard to see.

Beyond Surrender: Marian Sims, Francis B. Simkins, And Revisionism In Reconstruction South Carolina, David B. Parker

Faculty and Research Publications

Historian Francis Butler Simkins's 1932 book 'South Carolina during Reconstruction' presented one of the earliest revisionist examinations of Reconstruction. Simkins suggested Reconstruction failed because it was not radical enough, and carpetbaggers could have succeeded had they confiscated land and destroyed the South's caste system. Simkins elaborated his views in his 1939 essay in the 'Journal of Southern History,' his paper "The Everlasting South" delivered to the 1946 meeting of the Southern Historical Association, and his 1954 presidential address to the Southern Historical Association. Simkins corresponded with novelist Marian McCamy Sims, who wrote seven novels set among the upper- and middle-class …

Corrective Justice, Equal Opportunity, And The Legacy Of Slavery And Jim Crow, David B. Lyons

Faculty Scholarship

Chattel slavery was a brutally cruel, repressive, and exploitative system of racial subjugation. When it was abolished, the former slaveholders owed the freedmen compensation for the terrible wrongs of enslavement. Ex-slaves sought reparations, especially in the form of land, but few received any sort of recompense. The wrongs they suffered were never repaired.

No one alive today can be held accountable for the wrongs of chattel slavery, and those who might now be called upon to pay reparations were not even born until many decades after slavery ended. For some scholars, the lack of accountable parties makes current reparations claims …

The Politics Of Judicial Interpretation: The Federal Courts, Department Of Justice, And Civil Rights, 1866-1876, Robert John Kaczorowski

History

This landmark work of Constitutional and legal history is the leading account of the ways in which federal judges, attorneys, and other law officers defined a new era of civil and political rights in the South and implemented the revolutionary 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments during Reconstruction.

"Newspaper Notes, A Continuation: Miscellaneous." Chronicles Of Smith County, Texas 35 No. 2 (Winter 1996): 18-24, Vicki Betts

Presentations and Publications

Newspaper articles about miscellaneous activities in Tyler and Smith County, Texas, during the Civil War and Reconstruction, gleaned from regional papers.

"Newspaper Notes, A Continuation: Judiciary, Government," Chronicles Of Smith County, Texas 35 No. 1 (Summer 1996): 9-14.

Vicki Betts

"Newspaper Notes, A Continuation: Newspapers." Chronicles Of Smith County, Texas 31 No. 1 (Summer 1992): 36-44., Vicki Betts

Presentations and Publications

Articles gleaned from regional newspapers concerning newspapers in Tyler and Smith County, Texas, 1860-1875.

W.J. Cash, The New South And The Rhetoric Of History, Edward L. Ayers

History Faculty Publications

Despite the attention devoted to the fiery early chapters of The Mind of the South, where Cash's language and audacity take us by surprise, the heart of the book lies in the New South. Cash wrote above all, I think, to explain why the white Southerners he knew--those in the cotton mill country of the Carolina Piedmont--behaved the way they did. The years after Reconstruction consume two-thirds of Cash's book because those are the years that troubled him, that posed the problems he felt most acutely.

[Introduction To] The Promise Of The New South: Life After Reconstruction, Edward L. Ayers

Bookshelf

At a public picnic in the South in the 1890s, a young man paid five cents for his first chance to hear the revolutionary Edison talking machine. He eagerly listened as the soundman placed the needle down, only to find that through the tubes he held to his ears came the chilling sounds of a lynching. In this story, with its blend of new technology and old hatreds, genteel picnics and mob violence, Edward Ayers captures the history of the South in the years between Reconstruction and the turn of the century.

Ranging from the Georgia coast to the Tennessee …

"The Horace Chilton Memoirs, Part I." Chronicles Of Smith County, Texas 30 No. 1 (Summer 1991): 1-19., Vicki Betts

Presentations and Publications

Senator Horace Chilton's memoirs of growing up in Tyler, Texas, during secession, Civil War and Reconstruction, including an account of the emancipation of the family's slaves. His father, George Chilton, belonged to the Knights of the Golden Circle, was a delegate to the Secession Convention, and served in the Third Texas Cavalry, then as ordnance officer under Gen. Bee. He was elected to Congress after the war but was denied his seat.

"The Horace Chilton Memoirs, Part Ii." Chronicles Of Smith County, Texas 30 No. 2 (Winter, 1991): 1-11., Vicki Betts

Presentations and Publications

Senator Horace Chilton's description of Tyler, Texas, from when he was a boy during the Civil War.

The Heart Of American History (Book Review), Edward L. Ayers

History Faculty Publications

Review of the book, The Heart of American History by James McPherson. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989.

The era of the Civil War and Reconstruction remains the crucible of American history, the trial that decisively defined this country and its self-perceived mission. The American people seem to recognize that fact, for no era in our history attracts the general reading public as does that between 1861 and 1877.

The Old Arguments Anew: Proslavery And Antislavery Thought During Reconstruction, John David Smith

The Kentucky Review

No abstract provided.

David Hope Sadler Family Papers - Accession 76, Sadler Family Papers

Manuscript Collection

The Sadler Family Papers consist of photocopies of deeds, land grants and wills (1809, 1840-1841, and nd), correspondence and newspaper clippings (1929-1941) with the bulk of the collection consisting of correspondence between members of the Sadler Family of Rock Hill, South Carolina and their friends. Subjects include agriculture, the lives of women during and after the Civil War, the physical and mental condition of the Confederate troops during the War, freedman labor, living standards during Reconstruction, and life in early Rock Hill.

Northerners In The Reconstruction Of Hampton, Virginia, 1865-1870, Gladys A. Blair

History Theses & Dissertations

The 1870 census for Hampton, Virginia indicated that out of the 8,303 total population, 176 were foreign born and 672 came from states other than Virginia. A logical explanation for the presence of the large number of northerners is that they were carpetbaggers who had come South after the war to take advantage of the prostrate southerners. This paper analyzes the Yankee population in Hampton, Virginia in the period following the Civil War. It discusses the origins of the northerners, their reasons for coming to Hampton, their occupations, the Hampton political situation, and the impact the northerners made on the …

Signed Photograph Of Robert E. Lee And George Peabody (And Others) At White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, August 1869., Unknown

Broadus R. Littlejohn, Jr. Manuscript and Ephemera Collection

This photograph, taken 1869 at White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, is the last photograph of Robert E. Lee before his death in 1870. Seen by some as a symbol of early reconciliation between North and South, the image features Lee (seated, 2nd from left) alongside George Peabody (seated, 3rd from left). Peabody was a British-American industrialist and philanthropist who supported the Union during the war, but was fêted by fellow guests at the Springs in 1869 for his postwar generosity and investment in the Southern education system. Both he and Lee shared the belief that education was the best means …

Speech Of Hon. Charles D. Drake, Of Missouri, Delivered In The Senate Of The United States, February 6, 1868, Charles D. Drake

Regional Items

Transcript of a speech by Charles D. Drake (Missouri) to the United States Senate, February 6, 1868.

Speech Of Hon. Green Clay Smith, Of Kentucky, On Reconstruction, Kentucky Library Research Collections

Research Collections

Green Clay Smith speaks against Radical Reconstruction, directly naming Thaddeus Stevens and Samuel Shellabarger in his arguments. Additionally, he speaks against suffrage for African Americans.