The Era of Reconstruction, 1865 to 1877, Was

May 17, 2017……………….. take home test:due Tuesday May 23

YOU have listened carefully in class to each other explain many of the documents in the Reader on Reconstruction (vol. 3, Unit 6). Now go back into the Reader and begin to re-ask the question we posed at the outset (and in the introductory essay) about success(es) or failure(s).

EXPLICITLY, using 4 (or more) of the documents (short sharp quotes) from Unit 6 on Reconstruction, write a 600-800 word essay on the degree to which believe the “era of Reconstruction (1865 to 1877) was a success or a failure. (It may be both, some success, some failure, but on the whole how do you judge or weigh the period?) You must use at least four quotes or direct references from the material.

I provide here a 400 word example (approximately ½ of a minimum reply) of the kind of historical writing we are aiming for. Notice that is use our documents explicitly…..you should not look up on the internet any answers here. Use the evidence from the reader to make asserts and or raise questions.

The era of Reconstruction, 1865 to 1877, was …….

Images from Harper’s Weekly, (doc. set 5) a major magazine in the post Civil War era, are rather shocking black and white cartoons by Thomas Nast from the period span the Reconstruction era. They depict a largely failed set of policies. In the first image from August, 1865 it appears Nast argues for extending the vote to black freedmen in the southern states. The caption reads “Franchise: And not this man?” The man is a black union soldier who has lost his leg in the Civil War. We know that this extension of civil liberties was feared by southerners and many in the north and border states as well. It would take the 14th Amendment (doc. set 4) to try to achieve this expansion of voting rights and the right for a black man to also be elected within a state as a representative of government.

The third Nast cartoon in the set suggests a comical and racist view of the kind of reconstruction governments that operated under black political leadership in the late 1860s and early 1870s. The image from the cover of a March, 1874 Harper’smagazine suggests misrule by African-Americans in a southern “Reconstructed” state. Southern whites resisted federal enforcement of not just voting rights but the attempts of black politicians to rule legitimately and to raise taxes to provide for the improvement of life for freedmen in southern states. In document 6, “Southern Whites Reply” from South Carolina in 1869, comes strong language from white citizens rejecting the idea that “those who own no property are to levy taxes.” The whites believe the new black legislators should not be allowed to do this to pay for “free schools for the education of negro children, for the support of old negroes in the poorhouses…” The white rejection of social and economic reconstruction for the most injured party from the days of slavery was partly due to their bitterness at losing the war, and partly to do with the real harms the war had created to the southern economy. They oppose black voting rights and the Radical Republican ideas about confiscating the land and uplifting African-Americans by asserting “we will keep up this contest until we have regained the heritage of political control…” By 1876 most southern states will have reverted to white rule and increasing segregation and discrimination.

To what extent could the failure of the era, then, be attributed to economics and what portion to unreconstructed attitudes and racism in the deep south?....

[this is about 400 words from an essay of about 800 words].