08: Reconstruction

The Lost Cause is one of the most deeply ingrained mythologies in American history.

But if this is to be our 1989, we must make the most of it. The whole world may be watching.

Although the State of New Jersey passed a gradual emancipation law in 1804, it was the last northern state to emancipate its slaves,

New Jersey had one of the severest slave codes in the northern colonies and was one of the few northern states to sanction the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850,

New Jersey adopted the Thirteenth Amendment on January 23, 1866 only after originally rejecting it on March 16, 1865; and

Title: Report on the Condition of the South

First published 1865

reason does, under existing circumstances, not appear odious in the south. The people are not impressed with any sense of its criminality. And, secondly, there is, as yet, among the southern people an <i>utter absence of national feeling</i>

Eric Foner

“I am not a believer in originalism and do not want to operate on terrain constructed by the conservative justices. Originalism is intellectually indefensible.

That’s part of the historical effort to understand the time period. But to think that there’s one original meaning is just foolish, in my opinion.

I’m a believer in what they call the living Constitution; you apply these principles at the present, not by going back to figuring out what in 1866 Senator Jacob Howard or Charles Sumner, or for that matter, Jefferson Davis thought about what the Fourteenth Amendment meant.

actually, for public policies far more far-reaching than this court would ever agree to. And of course, every one of those three amendments ends with a section saying Congress shall have the power to enforce this amendment. Not the Supreme Court, not the secretary of state or somebody — Congress. But over time, the Supreme Court has asserted its right to overrule what Congress decides, even though the Constitution textually, specifically gives it to Congress.

They didn’t trust the Supreme Court. How could you trust a body which had produced the <em>Dred Scott</em> decision not that long before?

How these originalists can accept <em>Brown v. Board of Education</em> has always been very mysterious for me. You know, it’s not an originalist decision. In fact, the Supreme Court explicitly said—[Chief Justice Earl] Warren explicitly said, “We don’t know what the people intended in 1866. We’re interested in what we should do now.” That’s how I would interpret it.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, where she says that Reconstruction was a time when <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/Eighty_Years_and_More_1815_1897/xooEAAAAYAAJ?hl=en&amp;gbpv=1&amp;pg=PA241&amp;printsec=frontcover" onclick="javascript:window.open('https://www.google.com/books/edition/Eighty_Years_and_More_1815_1897/xooEAAAAYAAJ?hl=en&amp;gbpv=1&amp;pg=PA241&amp;printsec=frontcover'); return false;">the fundamentals of government were debated</a> all up and down the society, in churches, at every fireside—people were debating these things in their homes. And yet you never get a sense of that—that they were trying to work out what these principles meant. And there’s no single original meaning that one can devise out of this.

abstraction of colorblindness.

Colorblindness is not the only original meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment. It was the original meaning in the eyes of some people, but not a lot of others.

But yes, to say that all citizens must enjoy the same rights as white persons was a complete repudiation of the history of the United States up to that point. Up to that point, white people enjoyed far more rights than any other group of people had. For the law now to say, “No, no, you can’t do that”—whiteness now becomes not a form of exclusion, but a standard that must apply to everybody. You want to know what basic rights in terms going to court, or testifying, or whatever, that non-whites should enjoy—look at what white people have. And then that’s the same thing that non-whites ought to have.

Lost Cause ideology, an alternative explanation for the Civil War developed by white Southerners after the war’s end, seeks to rationalize the Confederacy.

This website can help you to better understand Confederate monuments and the context in which they were created. Start with the historical introduction, which includes information about who erected the monuments, along with when, where, and why.

How the facts of American history have in the last half century been falsified because the nation was ashamed. The South was ashamed because it fought to perpetuate human slavery. The North was ashamed because it had to call in the black men to save the Union, abolish slavery and establish democracy.