Hope, Anger, and Engineering in a Reconstruction Landscape

Abstract

In the years following the Civil War, a radical congressman conspired with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to undertake a massive levee project that would have created the largest freedpeople’s colony of the Reconstruction era. The project was never built, but the rhetoric around the federal infrastructure project illustrates the complex motivations behind attempts to redesign the American landscape after emancipation. Engineers and politicians channeled strongly felt political emotions into changes in the land, instrumentalizing complex feelings about the war and the injustices of slavery into physical and symbolic acts. Freedpeople navigated the notions of order that White military and civil officials tried to impose on the defeated South, forming communities according to their own priorities and finding opportunities where possible in a landscape of conflict that continued well after the official cessation of hostilities. The article concludes that an examination of the emotional motivations of both designers and the various “publics” that designed landscapes serve can illuminate the relationship between design and the desire for justice, and what role postwar actors imagined that the built environment could play in support of constructing a multiracial democracy.