Main questions
- What would become of former Confederates and former slaves?
- What does freedom mean, and for whom?
- Freed people: autonomy, mobility, land
- Planters: economic freedom to control workers to reboot Southern economy
Key concepts and terms
- Second American Revolution
- Connection between 13th Amendment and mass incarceration
- Restoration (Presidential Reconstruction)
- Freedmen’s Bureau
- Civil Rights Act of 1866 and definitions of American citizenship
- 14th Amendment and consequences in American law
- Birthright citizenship
- Equal protections clause
- Compromises on black suffrage
- Military Reconstruction (1867)
- Myth of “bayonet rule”
- Reconstruction as labor struggle
- Free labor ideology and the Republican Party
- Subsistence and post-emancipation societies
- Compromise of sharecropping
- Ku Klux Klan: political and class violence to establish control
- Paramilitary arm of the Democratic South
- “Brotherhood of property holders”
- “Lost Cause” and memory of the Civil War
- Colfax Massacre vs. Riot (“end of carpetbag misrule in the South”)
- Confederate war memorials (e.g. Stone Mountain Memorial)
- Reconciliationist memory
- Emancipationist memory
Key people
- Andrew Johnson, Thaddeus Stevens, and disagreements with Republican Party
- Alexander Stephens (Cornerstone Speech)
- W.E.B. DuBois (Black Reconstruction)
- Woodrow Wilson (Blue and Gray Reunion)
Additional resources
Glory. Directed by Edward Zwick. Color, 122 mins. 1989. A movie about the first African-American military unit during the Civil War.
13th. Directed by Ava DuVernay. Color, 100 mins. 2016. A documentary about race, justice, and mass incarceration in the U.S.
Lincoln. Directed by Steven Spielberg. Color, 150 mins. 2012. A biopic based on: Goodwin, Doris Kearns. Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln. Simon & Schuster, 2006. ISBN: 9780743270755.
