While the Civil War gets all the glory of movies, celebrations, and heroics, Reconstruction is rendered a sad story. It’s a tragedy. It’s a travesty. Healing defeated justice. Dreams were deferred. It led to the “nadir” of black history. I hate sad stories, even though I often find myself writing or talking about them as a scholar, and I particularly hate leaving my students depressed. So to discuss Reconstruction, I forced them to address who the heroes of Reconstruction were and what successes matched the obvious failures. They used the Major Problems documents, and we had a great conversation. I learned that some of them are already thinking like historians.
Here’s what I my found out from the class. First, the NCAA can be a frustrating organization and that my scholar-athletes have yet to receive the funds to purchase their classroom books. Ugh. Second, Elizabeth Cady Stanton was right to challenge abolitionists for their unwillingness to move on women’s rights. Third, Lucy McMillan of South Carolina was cool for testifying against the Klan. Here was a case where the government listened directly to a former slave. Fourth, national reconciliation was nice, but not at the expense of rights for African Americans. So far, so good.
What was most impressive about the discussion was that many of my students wanted to judge the past on its own merit. When I asked “was Reconstruction a success,” one said “no, because so many established goals went either unrealized or warped.” Tell me more, I encouraged. This young woman then went through Thaddeus Stevens’s calls for land redistribution and legal rights, and how those were overwhelmed. She detailed how the 15th Amendment was worked around, and how rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” went under assault. What a great answer! She didn’t use her contemporary understanding of right and wrong; she used criteria from the past. Hooray!
Finally, I learned that none of my students – none of them – cared about Andrew Johnson’s impeachment. None of them recalled Bill Clinton’s hearings and none of them thought it was important. So for future renditions of Major Problems, I’m thinking maybe the document on impeachment should be ditched. What would be a good replacement? Any ideas? I was thinking about maybe a diary or journal entry from out West that somehow connected to the impeachment.
Hi Ed,
I’d like to ask a question about the concern with telling sad stories. Should we be more sensitive to this when dealing with undergrads? I ask this question because I’ve had to address this when I look out in the audience and see the pain on students’ faces when I’m talking at length about lynching, for example (although I wonder if my tendency to focus on what I see as the tragic side of history has caused some students pause in taking any future courses with me). I ask this because I’ve tended to resist prompting students to find heroes. In the course just mentioned (which was a survey of African American religion from slavery to the present), it seems that students were too eager to focus on King or Malcolm X. There was a tendency not simply to get close to the present, but to fasten on the activists or those who explicitly challenged “the system.” Am I being too picky or idiosyncratic when I try to push students to examine other characters, sometimes figures that we might deem more constrained in some ways or who were less “heroic” in their daily or public lives? Just some thoughts in response to your comment about hating sad stories. There is admittedly a part of me that wants students to linger in the discomfort as a way of appreciating the harshness of the past (especially when it comes to race). But I hope that does not translate into unnecessarily inflicting my tragic view of history upon them.
Hey Curtis,
I think you are 100% right about everyday people who practiced more constrained lives. I think about that for Reconstruction in terms of women like Laura Towne – that missionary to South Carolina who spent her entire career there (I know you and I have some differences of opinion about that Reconstruction moment and the missionaries), but the point was she worked her best in harsh circumstances.
For undergrads, I try to teach the sad stories in the most positive way possible. So for lynching, I always show paintings from African American artists where they try to “redeem” the lynch victim in some way (usually by likening him to Christ). This way, my narrative and visual presentations are not overwhelmed by the forces of hate and violence. But it’s hard, because so much of the past is sad … for lots of complex reasons.
My thoughts are still jumbled on whether Reconstruction was an overall success or a failure. I feel as if each success in the Reconstruction also brought some sort of failure. It was a landmark achievement for the African-American slaves to be free and actually be able to hold political office. But it was short lived and Southerners used anything they can from the Black Codes to segregation to limit their personal freedom. It was also a great success that Northerners and Southerners came back together politically faster than most nations would have. But the Southern song “I’m a good old Rebel” clearly shows that it would take decades before Northerners and Southerners would come together as men serving the same country. So I believe the Reconstruction would be at a stalemate on being an overall success or an overall failure.
I am going to be commenting on Ch.1 Reconstruction and the eighth document, “Lucy McMillan, a Former Slave in South Carolina, Testifies About White Violence, 1871.”
I found this document very interesting because i think it shows the side to Reconstruction that failed. The North had problems of it’s own so it was ignoring the South which allowed white southerners to let loose and take out their anger on southern African Americans.
As you can see in Lucy McMillan’s interview, Reconstructions goals of stopping violence in the south did not succeed. The KKK was out and on a roll. People couldn’t even trust their own neighbors. Can you imagine watching your own house burn down and not being able to stop the men who started the fire?
At the same time, her interview shows progress in the South. Just the fact that officials were willing to listen to what she had to say shows a lot of progress. I think this document is the perfect depiction of reconstruction in that it shows its successes and its downfalls all in one.
I agree with Haley, I just read the document, “Lucy McMillian, a Former Slave in South Carolina, Testifies About White Violence, 1871” again and it in fact does show reconstruction failing, and in a way progressing. Because the KKK was still very much so a threat to tons of Blacks in the South, this shows that Blacks rights were still limited and were still in danger. And because the KKK still had a strong presence in the South it was clear that the government was not putting forth any effort to terminate the KKK. But this document is also very interesting because for once Lucy was asked about her story and able to share what happened. This shows little steps towards improvement.
Lorena Klopp
The document I will be discussing is the same as Lorena and Haley, I just thought that this was on the of most exciting articles. Lucy McMillan is given the chance to testify in court, and people are actually listening to her. I could only imagine the fear that McMillan was feeling. Her house was burnt down for the KKK and she just watched it burn. And what makes it even worse is that she knew the men that had done it and she had even raised one of the boys since he was a child. This just shows how terrible things were in this time period, especially if you were an African American. However, I found it interesting that McMillan actually would go to testify. How was she not scared that the KKK would find her afterwards and harm her? It was also interesting reading this just because you can get a sense of how these slaves acted. They weren’t educated so when they spoke it wasn’t proper grammar, as we can see when McMillan was speaking. I also find it interesting because I like reading cases, especially these types.
-Nadin T.
I have always found that topic such as the Reconstruction and the Holocaust has an impact of me. For me frustrating reading on authors like Ida b. Wells that talk about how many were unjustified lynch for the so-called Christians in the south. Then when I am reading books on reconstruction I find myself even doing more research on the mistreatment of blacks and find myself more infuriated. I never understood why women and African Americans never worked together. The blog points out who abolitionist did not move onto women’s rights. But isn’t the problem too, that the women’s movement never help support race equality or that white women never worked together with black women.