Story Of Reconstruction Research Articles

John Bingham and the Story of American Liberty: The Lost Cause Meets the 'Lost Clause'

For many years, the nation ignored how slavery and the Southern racial caste system undermined the nation's ideals of equality, liberty, and democracy. We celebrated the Framers of the original Constitution and of the Bill of Rights, but largely ignored our second group of framers who gave the nation the new birth of freedom in the post Civil War amendments. Most of us have never heard of the old time Republicans who framed the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, people like John A. Bingham of Ohio. To the extent that it told the story of Reconstruction at all, the dominant view until the 1950s tended to be critical of the Republicans in Congress from 1866-1873 and critical of the Republican Southern state governments established during Reconstruction. The Southern story had a pervasive effect and reconsideration of it was slow to penetrate the law. Raoul Berger's attack on the Warren Court's incorporation decisions show the lingering effects of repressing the story of the clash between slavery on one side and liberty and democracy on the other. Berger's book shows how most Americans had long forgotten a crucial part of their history - that slavery (and the caste system that replaced it) threatened Bill of Rights liberties such as free speech, free press, free exercise of religion, freedom from unreasonable searches, and freedom from cruel and unusual punishments. I will discuss John A. Bingham's understanding of liberty under the Constitution. I start with two speeches Bingham made in the House of Representatives in 1856. Both grew out of the controversy in Kansas. I then discuss his speeches on liberty during the Civil War, and how his views on liberty influenced his work on the Reconstruction Amendments.

The Presidency of Andrew Johnson (review)

BOOK REVIEWS281 Daniel Pratt as well as other master builders and carpenters leaves a curious gap; and if the reader were unaware that Flannery O'Connor was a Milledgeville native, descendant of the Clines, and resident of the town until her death in 1964, he would never know otherwise from this book. O'Connor, the most distinguished alumna of Milledgeville's Georgia State College for Women (now Georgia College) is not mentioned. Finally, where over 230 pages are spent on Milledgeville's first century and a half, not even thirty are devoted to its last onehundred-plus years. Reflective, one supposes, of the old Georgia adage that all the big potatoes are in the ground, but still a strange handling of a community's recent history. The overall effect, though, is of a distinguished historian writing at the peak of his powers. Bonner is discreet, sly, humorous, and eloquent by turn, but he is always perceptive. Milledgeville is, en toto, an excellent piece of ante-bellum Southern urban history. Phinizy Spalding University of Georgia The Presidency of Andrew Johnson. By Albert Castel. (Lawrence: The Regents Press of Kansas, 1979. Pp. viii, 262. $15.00.) The above work is a part of the American Presidency Series of the Regents Press of Kansas, each volume of which, the editors say, "will be a comprehensive, synthetic work which will draw upon the best in pertinent secondary literature, yet leave room for the author's own analysis and interpretation" (p. v). In addition to this synthesizing of scholarship, Castel uses several kinds of original source materials, including diaries, memoirs, and manuscripts, though not newspapers. Castel sees his task as (1) to write about Andrew Johnson's administration without allowing the central problem of Reconstruction to crowd out all other events; (2) to deal with the enigma of Johnson's motivation; and (3) to achieve some objectivity about a President who has been extravagandy praised and roundly condemned. He accomplishes these objectives very well. For example, he treats Johnson's administration primarily as a story of Reconstruction, but nevertheless uses other events, especially foreign affairs, as a way of relieving the tension of the drama. The author's way of dealing with Johnson's motivation is also relatively successful: hethinks the Presidenthad a strongcommitment to a somewhat antiquated Jacksonian democracy, a commitment closely linked to Johnson's personal need for self justification. This interpretation provides a way to explain actions that might otherwisebe seen as the president's bent of political suicide. But Castel may well underestimate one source of Johnson's motivation: he says that the President's 282civil war history "attitudes on race did not differ substantially from that [sic.] ofJefferson, Jackson, or Lincoln" (p. 228). To be sure, all four of these men believed in the superiority of whites. But the intensity of some of the statements that have been attributed to Johnson suggests that he may have given greater priority to these attitudes than did Jefferson, Lincoln or even Jackson. In his assessment of the views of Johnson and the views of historians about Johnson, Castel is a model of fairness and balance. Yet his own views on Johnson and Reconstruction, though always kept well in the background, are nevertheless candidly acknowledged. He believes, for example, that "Johnson was correct in asserting that ultimately the blacks in the Soudi would have to come to terms with the whites and that it would be the whites who would set the terms . . ." (p. 229). Personally, I see less inevitability in the outcome of Reconstruction. The Southern whites had not been able to set all the terms of race relations even when the Confederacy still had armies in the field. It seems to me that, with some luck, the men and women who ended slavery might have carried out even greater changes in the American system of racial stratification; or, by the same token, had things gonebetter forPresident Johnson, they might have accomplished less. These speculations, however, detract nothing from Castel's book. William McKee Evans California State Polytechnic University, Pomona The Civil War Letters of General Frank "BuW Paxton, C.S.A.: A Lieutenant of Lee ir Jackson. Edited by John Gallatin Paxton...

The Trouble They Seen: Black People Tell the Story of Reconstruction (review)

The Trouble They Seen: Black People Tell the Story of Reconstruction (review)

The Trouble They Seen: Black People Tell the Story of Reconstruction

The Trouble They Seen: Black People Tell the Story of Reconstruction

The Trouble They Seen: Black People Tell the Story of Reconstruction

The Trouble They Seen: Black People Tell the Story of Reconstruction

The Trouble They Seen: Black People Tell the Story of Reconstruction.

The Trouble They Seen: Black People Tell the Story of Reconstruction.

"On Rewriting of the Story of Reconstruction in the U. S. History Textbooks"

"On Rewriting of the Story of Reconstruction in the U. S. History Textbooks"

The Angry Scar: The Story of Reconstruction

Journal Article The Angry Scar: The Story of Reconstruction. By Hodding Carter. Mainstream of America Series. (New York: Doubleday and Company, 1959. 425 pp. Bibliography and index. $5.95.) Get access Francis B. Simkins Francis B. Simkins Longwood College Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 46, Issue 3, December 1959, Pages 528–529, https://doi.org/10.2307/1892296 Published: 01 December 1959

The Angry Scar; The Story of Reconstruction.

The Angry Scar; The Story of Reconstruction.

The Story of Reconstruction.

The Story of Reconstruction.

The Leopard's Spots: A Romance of the White Man's Burden

Written as a response to Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin, this is the author's story of Reconstruction in post-Civil War South in which the Ku Klux is considered heroic and blacks are depicted as savage beasts, a threat to white women and American civilization. The Leopard's Spots is the first novel in Dixon's Klan trilogy which became the source for W.D. Griffith's film 1915, Birth of a Nation.