Introduction

The story of Benjamin Montgomery, the former slave who purchased the plantations of Confederate president Jefferson Davis, opens and closes Chapter 17. The experiences of the Montgomery family embody both the possibilities and failures of Reconstruction. 

Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation shaped not only the course of the Civil War, but also the debate over Reconstruction. The Union victory resolved the issue of abolition, but other central conflicts remained: the status of four million "freedpeople," the terms for reconstructing the Union, and the future of the Republican party. The experiment in Reconstruction, an attempt to resolve these issues, failed and was stigmatized for several generations as an orgy of misrule and corruption. Consequently, African-American congressmen like those commemorated below, who went "from the Plantation to the Senate," were dismissed as pawns. While this interpretation has been decisively rejected, Reconstruction remains one of the most controversial eras in American history. The experiment in Reconstruction ended with the question of racism still at the heart of American life.

Why did a disillusioned public abandon Reconstruction? What of the freedpeople themselves? What happens when the era is reconstructed through their voices? Your task in the Web activities for Chapter 17 is to view the visual evidence in the political cartoons of the era, to read selected slave narratives in order to think critically of the black experience, and then to consider how Civil War memorials and commemorations impacted memories of Reconstruction.

Web Activities

1.  Cartoons are part of the visual culture of American history. Images of the Reconstruction era are conveyed not only in photographs and commemorative prints (as above), but also in the commentary of cartoons. Careful evaluation and interpretation of these images is one aspect of practicing the historian's craft and understanding the shaping of public opinion. After 1867 Reconstruction receded from the public mind. What happened in the 1870s as reforming zeal began to wane? How were changing attitudes reflected in cartoons? 

• Compile a timeline of Reconstruction events. Use the list of "Significant Events" at the end of chapters 16 and 17 and the Reconstruction Timeline at Harper's Weekly as resources. Refer to your timeline as you study the cartoons. 
• Begin your research by reading a profile of Thomas Nast, the most important American political cartoonist of the era. Next review Dan Backer's A Brief History of Cartoons for additional background on the genre. 
• Evaluate each of the following cartoons/commemorative prints. Magnify as appropriate and read the explanatory text.
• Emancipation Lithograph, 1865 
• Pardon and Franchise, August 5, 1865
• Johnson Kicking Freedmen's Bureau, April 14, 1866 
• Reconstruction And How It Works, September 1, 1866 
• The Freedmen's Bureau, An Agency to Keep the Negro in Idleness, 1866 
• Amphitheatrum Johnsonianum, March 30, 1867 (magnify)
• The First Vote, November 16, 1867 
• Time Works Wonders, April 9, 1870
• The Fifteenth Amendment, Celebrated May 19th 1870
• Colored Rule in a Reconstructed State, March 14, 1874
• Worse Than Slavery, October 24, 1874 

2.  While cartoons offer insight into the public mind, what of the freedpeople themselves? What happens when the era is reconstructed through their voices? Black southerners sought respect, land, and the rights of citizenship. What did freedom mean? Did the nation miss an historic opportunity to create a multiracial society? The events of Reconstruction are said to have cast a long shadow over race relations for future generations. Do you agree? Your task is to read evidence in selected slave narratives and to think critically of the black experience and American's response to the era. As you read, ask, "How 'accurate' are the slave narratives? What is their 'value'?"

• Read the account Meeting between Black Religious Leaders and Union Military Authorities, January 12, 1865, to consider the future of the thousands of slaves freed by the march of Sherman's army. Garrison Frazier speaks for the group. How is freedom understood? What is Frazier's opinion on the best way to maintain freedom? On January 16, General Sherman issued Special Field Order 15 (later rescinded by Lincoln), setting aside part of coastal South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida for settlement exclusively by black people. The settlers were to receive "possessory title" to forty-acre plots.
• At the end of the war, black soldiers stationed near Petersburg, Virginia, wrote to the commissioner of the Freedmen's Bureau to protest the suffering of their wives, children, and parents at a settlement on Roanoke Island, North Carolina. Read North Carolina Black Soldiers to the Freedmen's Bureau Commissioner, summer, 1865. 
• Go to Bruce Fort's American Slave Narratives: An Online Anthology of the narratives of former slaves compiled from interviews conducted under the guidance of the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s.  Find the Annotated Index of Narratives and review the profiles of some of the freedpeople who took part in the project. Select several of the narratives for closer analysis.

3.  A period of intense commemoration of the Civil War followed the Reconstruction Era. Your assignment in this activity is to examine the relationship of memorial building to the legacy of the Civil War. In what ways did public commemorative sculpture reshape the Civil War and Reconstruction experience? What purpose did memorialization serve; did the monuments unite or divide the nation? How do Civil War monuments continue to shape public memory? 

• Read The Past in the Present: The Life of Memorials by Kirk Savage in Harvard Design Magazine, Fall 1999. Savage contends that monuments craft the "national narrative." He argues, "The inner memories of a culture profoundly shape how its monuments are experienced and lived." What contemporary evidence does Savage offer to explain why monument building remains contested ground? Does this article encourage you to think about history in new and different ways? 
• View the Emancipation Monument (magnify) at the Library of Congress, and see the complete text of the Oration by Frederick Douglass, delivered on the occasion of the unveiling of the freedmen's monument in memory of Abraham Lincoln in Lincoln Park, Washington, D. C., April 14th, 1876.
• Investigate Elizabeth Paul's project for the American Studies program at the University of Virginia, The Local Confederate Monument on the Battlefield of the Public Sphere. Follow section links to The Dedications and The Monuments. How does Paul suggest southerners sought to define America in the post-Civil War era? 
• Memorial building was equally intense in the North. Visit the National Gallery of Art exhibit Robert Gould Shaw and the Massachusetts Fifty-fourth, honoring one of the first African-American units of the Civil War. To begin, click on "Start Tour." Follow the links through "Introduction" to "History" and "Memorial Analysis." 

Additional Research Links

Reconstruction 

• Reconstruction officially commenced with the Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction issued December 8, 1863, by President Lincoln. The text is located at The Freedmen and Southern Society Project at the University of Maryland. The project is a rich resource of online documents intended to help  "explain how black people traversed the bloody ground from slavery to freedom between the beginning of the Civil War in 1861 and the beginning of Radical Reconstruction in 1867." Included is a Chronology of Emancipation during the Civil War. 
• Examine the aftermath of war for southern white women at Hearts at Home: End of an Era, an exhibit at the Alderman Library, University of Virginia. View documents relating to the experience of southern women in defeat, the commemorative organizations they founded, and their campaigns to erect monuments. Each of the documents can be magnified.
• The Impeachment of Andrew Johnson is part of the online archive of nineteenth-century Harper's Weekly articles and illustrations. Dedicated to the impeachment trials of Andrew Johnson, the site presents more than 200 excerpts from the magazine's coverage of the conflict and a series of political cartoons. Background summaries are provided, as well as biographies and portraits of 28 major figures from the trial.
• Two projects at the University of Virginia offer additional insights on Reconstruction Era cartooning. Scartoons: Racial Satire and the Civil War by Ian Finseth  examines "the ways in which the Civil War, while transforming the status of African Americans, was itself transformed in the minds and by the pens of political cartoonists." The Post War Years: Free At Last provides an analysis of four era cartoons not featured in activity one.
• An abundant  resource for additional research on events, individuals, and institutions of the Reconstruction era is African American Perspectives: Pamphlets from the Daniel A.P.Murray Collection, 1818-1907. Maintained by the Library of Congress, the collection of digitized pamphlets pertinent to African-American life after the Civil War can be searched by keyword or browsed by subject and author index. 

Experiencing Freedom 

• "The Church in the Southern Black Community" is part of the "Documenting the American South" project maintained by the University of North Carolina. The extensive collection of electronic texts (with illustrations) is arranged alphabetically and includes works by P. Thomas Stanford, Amanda Smith, W. E. B. Du Bois, Henry McNeal Turner, and Albion Tourgée. 
• The Problem of Freedom: The Destruction of American Slavery, Freedom's Strange Fruit from the Library of Duke University describes documents that reflect the mixed consequences of Emancipation. The site includes brief abstracts and a muster roll relating to service of slaves in the Union Army and their status after the war. 
• Also at Duke see The Emma Spaulding Bryant Letters. During the summer of 1873, Emma Bryant wrote her husband John, who worked with the Freedmen's Bureau in Georgia. Her letters shed light on relationships between husbands and wives at the time, as well as on the problems of Reconstruction.
• The Freedmen's Bureau in Augusta County is a student project at the University of Virginia. Begin by going to Brief Overview, which describes the Freedmen's Bureau function and the problems encountered, then follow related links. The site includes materials on Social Services that addressed the day to day problems of the freedmen and destitute whites: Labor & Contracts, and Family Services. 

Reconstruction Abandoned

• "Louisiana was the only region deep within the Confederacy where Union authorities implemented experimental Reconstruction policies during the Civil War." See Reconstruction: A State Divided and Reconstruction: Change and Continuity in Daily Life. For another state perspective go to Texas and Reconstruction. Bill Hardt suggests in A Shared Past that, because the long-term effects of Reconstruction in Texas are comparable to the experience of other southern states, understanding them is important. Note the emphasis Hardt places on economic Reconstruction and the similar conclusions each site presents on the consequences of Reconstruction. 
• The Tax Museum, 1866-1900: Reconstruction to the Spanish-American War. Although the site includes material beyond the scope of this chapter, it provides a useful summary of fiscal policy during the period 1866 - 1877. Analysis of tariff issues, suggesting the broader political and cultural significance of taxation, illustrates the new focus in American political life that accompanied the abandonment of African Americans. Refer to the sections covering the years prior to 1877.
• The final test of Reconstruction was the 1876 presidential election. Harper's Weekly provides extensive archival materials on the disputed election at Presidential Elections,1876. Coverage includes an "Overview," "Biographies" of important figures, a summary of "Issues," and 40 cartoons which can be magnified with companion explanatory text. 

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Post-Emancipation Societies in the Americas

• The Reconstruction experiment in the United States led by Radical Republicans attempted to forge more far-reaching social changes than in other post-emancipation societies. Issued as a war-time measure and implemented amidst violence and terror, emancipation and the enfranchisement of the freedmen that followed, sought to create an interracial democracy. In South America and the Caribbean (with the exception of Haiti and later, Cuba) the destruction of slavery may have occurred with less violence, but political and economic elites remained in control. 
• Two historians, Stanley L. Engerman in Slavery at Different Times and Places, and David Brion Davis in Looking at Slavery from Broader Perspectives, AHR Forum, Revolutions in the Americas, February 2000, advocate the need for more studies comparing post-emancipation societies.