The New Era’s More Civil War: How Big a Tent?

Abstract

First issued on January 13, 1870, the New Era appeared in Washington, DC, as the Fifteenth Amendment was about to assure voting rights to Black men. At the height of Radical Reconstruction, J. Sella Martin and Frederick Douglass addressed their efforts to “the Colored People of the United States” and detailed the liberating days of the African American community’s greatest hopes, while reprinting two stories about the Civil War and its immediate aftermath. The article examines their sharp differences as the weekly cast the postwar nation hovering between founding promise and a new birth of freedom.