Reconstruction In America

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In 1935, W. E. B. Du Bois published one of the first historical responses to the actual events of Reconstruction, denouncing the distorted retellings that most Americans had taken as fact. In his book, Black Reconstruction in America, Du Bois claimed that “the unending tragedy of Reconstruction is the utter inability of the American mind to grasp its real significance, its national and world-wide implications… This problem involved the very foundations of American democracy, both political and economic.” From the personal and political stories in Eric Foner’s Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction, it becomes clear that Du Bois’ message is one of the most important to take from the time period. The developments through the …show more content…
Numerous journals reported that blacks were becoming culturally and politically informed, but the reasons were better told by the freedpeople themselves. Land, the pursuit of upward class mobility and the right to vote had been available to poor white Americans for generations, and for the emancipated slaves, these were synonymous with freedom. Following the ratification of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments, blacks received the political part of their freedom: equality under the law, and the right to vote, so long as the federal government kept their word. In 1867, the support of black voters, whose “turnout ranged from 70 percent of those registered in Georgia to nearly 90 percent in Virginia,” secured a Republican majority on every southern state’s constitutional convention; “around one-third of the Republican delegates, 268 in all, were black” (Foner 143). This revealed the revolutionary nature of Reconstruction, as well as the presence of strong leaders in black communities that had developed in the antebellum era. Despite facing intimidation and violence from terrorist groups like the Ku Klux Klan, former slaves’ votes upheld the Reconstruction governments, which made great progress in modernizing education for children of both races. The economic freedom the former slaves yearned for, though, never came …show more content…
Thaddeus Stevens, just before his death, attempted to argue for land redistribution in the South, but the more moderate Republicans who were coming to lead Reconstruction believed the principles of free labor would suffice to raise blacks in society and that making exceptions to these principles would set a ‘bad precedent’ regarding workers in the North. “The Radicals’ failure to achieve land reform … ensured that most black southerners would be confined to agricultural labor on white-owned land, or menial jobs in southern cities” (Foner 202). The South, as demonstrated by the Black Codes, would not tolerate fair treatment of
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