Reconstruction Video blog post

    

    Most of us know that our country fought a civil war in the 1860s. But less is known about what came afterward. Which was the chaotic, exhilarating, and ultimately devastating period known as reconstruction. The reconstruction period is one extraordinary excitement. The time America could finally become the land of freedom that it had promised to be since the very beginning. Black people actually sat in the House of Representatives and the Senate; and poor whites and black people saw a common cause with one another. Seeing these opportunities appear for minorities they imagine that it will only get better.

    However, the achievements of reconstruction triggered fearsome backlash, constant terror and depression that lasted for decades. After 250 years of slavery, white Southerners could not quite accept the 4 million former slaves as equal members of their society. Violence was used to strip African Americans of the rights and privileges which they gained during Reconstruction. An example would be, The Charleston Massacre, which comes from a long history of white terror against African Americans.

    Reconstruction left a legacy of hope as well as violence. African Americans' hopes were far greater than what any government was accomplishing. A system functioning without race being a barrier to equality, is still something we are working on. When the speaker of this video was in high school, in the 1960s that’s when black history consisted of a few simple facts and a very light ending. Which was Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves. Just a hundred years after emancipation, black people were still fighting for the most basic rights.    

 

    April 9th, 1865, on Palm Sunday. At the village of Appomattox courthouse in Virginia, Confederate General Robert E Lee surrendered to United States Lieutenant General Ulysses S Grant. Lee's surrendering effectively signaled the end of the Civil War and the death of slavery in the United States. It was the slaves themselves who had helped bring it to pass. From the war's first days, crowds of enslaved people defied their masters and fled to Union lines. Others were freed by the United States Army as it occupied parts of the South. By the summer of 1862, thousands of slaves had found safe haven.

    Now that black men were finally allowed to enlist in the Union Army, 180,000 answered the call, most of them being former slaves. It was manpower that they brought to the union's side. There's no question that they strengthened the union and changed what a military victory would mean. The role of black soldiers, Lincoln said this himself was essential in ensuring that the war would end with the abolition of slavery.

    Freed slaves’ being citizens was very much in question, with few legal rights or protections guaranteed. As the government in Washington was wrestling with what was being called reconstruction. On the surface reconstruction just meant restoring the rebel states to the union. But what reconstruction really consisted of was the process by which American society, North, South, Black, White, tried to come to terms with the consequences of the Civil War, the reunion of the nation, the destruction of slavery, and the question of what the status of the 4 million former slaves would be as free people in American life. issues like education, land ownership, and workers' rights appeared.

    Eventually Abraham Lincoln spoke about reconstruction at the White House. For the first time in public, the President suggested that some black men be very intelligent and black veterans deserved the right to vote. Which was a huge step in the right direction however on April 14, 1865, Good Friday, John Wilkes Booth killed Lincoln. Which was the very start for a lot more to come.