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Simkins and Robert Woody collaborated on a new project which was to be a study of the Reconstruction era in South Carolina. The result of their project was the book South Carolina during Reconstruction, which stands out among the many works written in the early twentieth century on Reconstruction. Its reevaluation of the Dunning school and its inclusion of developments during Reconstruction that went beyond politics, such as economic and social matters, made it unique for its time. It deserves the significant place it holds in the annals of Reconstruction thought. South Carolina during Reconstruction also transformed Simkins into a major scholar and gave him a reputation as a progressive thinker.

This chapter discusses the implications of Abraham Lincoln's death to the Reconstruction era. He was not able to fulfill his own reconstruction plan while he lived, as it was evident in his last public address that he was appealing for the Louisiana plan. The public reception to Andrew Johnson's succession to the presidency. This chapter also discusses the Negro suffrage and the effect of Lincoln's death to the right of the Negroes, the effect of his assassination to the Lost Cause, the issues surrounding Lincoln's burial and memorial, and also the book published by Lizzy Keckley, Mrs. Lincoln's friend, about life inside the White House. The chapter also discusses the biographies written by some authors including Joseph H. Barrett, Josiah Holland and William H. Herndon.

The chapter discusses the state of the South in the 1880s just after the depression and the end of the Reconstruction era. Publications talk about a “New South”. The most prevalent occupation was working on the railroads but it was considered extraordinarily dangerous. The rail system can also be credited for the division of the country in to four time zones with the purpose of operating the system uniformly, efficiently, and safely. The chapter also discusses the economic condition of the freedpeople in the post-Reconstruction South. Cotton production was the prevalent occupation. This chapter also touches on the beginnings of segregation citing that the railroads became the scenes of the first statewide segregation laws throughout the South.

This chapter focuses on the autobiography published by Harriet Jacobs during the beginning of the Civil War. The book recounted Jacobs' unusual experience of slavery; in particular, her ability, as a literate, light-skinned slave with free relatives in town, to resist the sexual advances of her master, Dr. James Norcom, and to seek protection from a local white lawyer before escaping. Jacobs' narrative provides a valuable introduction to race relations in the Reconstruction era, offering an acute sociological portrait of the American slavery system and its long-term effects on whites and blacks, North and South. Namelessness, invisibility, and constant degradation were means of conferring upon slaves a condition of “social death.” The master–slave bond, as Jacobs describes it, is parasitical as well as perversely intimate: the slave institutionalized as marginal is essential to the social structure that denies her humanity.

This chapter provides an overview of the historic, political environment from Florida’s territorial beginnings through statehood and the Civil War. It distinguishes Florida’s territorial beginnings from the original 13 Colonies; it focuses on the impacts of the Civil War and the Reconstruction Era on the state’s political environment; and it discusses the origins of the population surges that began to reshape the state’s political arena. The chapter chronicles the foundation of Democratic one-party dominance that characterized the political environment in the Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries and Florida’s allegiance to the “Democratic Solid South following Reconstruction. It also chronicles the split between conservative and liberal factions in the Democratic Party and the opportunity it provided for the emerging Republican network.

This chapter explores the factors which shaped Booker T. Washington's entrepreneurial ideas. The political, economic, and social settings of the United States in the post-Reconstruction era, particularly the general Southern situation in the period from 1877 to 1915, shaped, developed, and reinforced Washington's ideas. Washington advocated that the upliftment of the African-American could be achieved more readily by addressing Southern racism than by engaging in Northern competition. Washington's public addresses and published writings tended to focus on political events when they discussed the effects of Reconstruction on African Americans. He felt that white leaders were using the African-American voters to gain political office and were not devoted to their advancement.

This chapter details the events during the last days of Abraham Lincoln. The civil war had ended at this time, and the Reconstruction Era began. Because of his programs that seemed to serve the majority of the people, Lincoln's popularity grew; making it harder for his opponents to prosecute cases, and even throw him out of office. His assassination on April 14, 1865, almost immediately made him a hero of the United States.

Klan attackers, government officials, and Klan victims each for their own reasons, intended for the story of Klan attacks to circulate. Ku-Klux, of course, dictated many of the terms of the attack, coercing victims to behave in certain ways and constraining them from behaving in others. Government officials wanted to hear certain sorts of stories, and used their authority to elicit certain sorts of attack narratives while preventing the expression of others. Victims, while the least powerful of these three, were usually the only ones present for the attack who could speak of it without incriminating themselves. While sometimes silenced by their fear of Ku-Klux, their need of government officials’ support, and the necessity of speaking in a way that to some degree both reflected the moment of violence orchestrated by the Klan and was considered relevant by those taking testimony, they nevertheless had the nontrivial power to choose to speak certain words, in certain ways, and to withhold others. In that way, they substantially shaped the nature of Klan narratives in circulation.

The chapter assesses the government-sponsored periodical Carry On, which frequently used the term “spirit” not just to describe the resilience of individual disabled veterans, but also the intellectual and artistic capabilities that distinguished Anglo-Americans from other races and ethnicities. In its run from 1918 to 1919,Carry On showcased the federal government’s new rehabilitative and vocational services by implicitly and explicitly drawing on evolutionary frameworks to show that only Anglo-American men were capable of transforming a prosthetic into a soul-enriching, civilization-advancing device. To make this point clearer, the magazine features several disabled African American soldiers, whose evolutionary stagnancy renders them unable to make prosthetics spiritually transformative instruments. Their depicted deficiencies are similar to the articles’ renderings of German primitiveness and brutality. In this light, the magazine shows just how slippery and manipulative racial codification could be in the opening decades of the twentieth century.

This chapter analyzes the emergence of antiblack violence in Kansas in the 1860s and 1870s. It argues that a dominant “Free State narrative” that has traditionally interpreted Kansas as a locale of historically benign race relations has failed to reflect the intensity of Reconstruction-Era racism in a Southern Plains state that was born amid antebellum sectional agitation over the slavery question. In the aftermath of the war, white Kansas made a mockery of the Smoky Hill and Republican Union's optimism, unleashing a campaign of violence aimed at enforcing their supremacy over blacks in the young state. The dichotomy between the Union's wartime optimism and its assessment of reality thereafter finds its parallel in the historiography of Kansas.

This book begins with a description of how Anna Julia Cooper and Lucy Cox both struggled to be understood as women of intelligence and vision. Their differing positions, however, shaped how they voiced their grievances regarding the treatment of black women in America. Cooper, born into slavery in 1858 in Raleigh, North Carolina, exemplified racial advancement after emancipation. Influenced by the Reconstruction era and the dictates of the dominant nineteenth-century gender ideology, she was one of a handful of black women to graduate from Oberlin with bachelor's and master's degrees. Eventually earning a Ph.D. in 1925 at the Sorbonne in Paris, she had a long career as an activist and educator in Washington, DC. Cooper consistently questioned the sexism and racism she encountered and is best known for her germinal 1892 black feminist text, A Voice from the South.

This chapter examines the backgrounds and early adult experiences of five key leaders of the national organizations the book considers. These leaders are T. Thomas Fortune, founder of the National Afro-American League; Reverdy C. Ransom, the earliest outspoken radical within the National Afro-American Council; Mary Church Terrell, founding leader of the National Association of Colored Women; Mary White Ovington, member of the NAACP's inner circle of founders; and William Lewis Bulkley, a founder and early board member of the National Urban League. The chapter explores the similarities and differences of these leaders' backgrounds as well as the early development of their activist ideas and commitments.

This chapter discusses the history of the relationship between labor and the press from the Reconstruction era up to the eve of the Second World War. It examines the role of newspapers in the struggle between labor unions and management, highlighting the stands of the newspaper editors Major Fred Sullens, Henry Grady, and Thomas E. Watson, on the labor system in the Southern states. It also notes the rise and fall of the Populist movement, which aims to champion the cause of agrarian reforms and to improve the living conditions of the Southern laborers.

Martí was witness to unhappy consequences of the U.S. Civil War, including a post-Reconstruction era in the South full of violence and repression. He reported on lynchings of blacks throughout the 1880s and on a black man burned to death in Texarkana in 1892. He also wrote of education for African Americans as a path to progress. In his much-studied 1886 chronicle of the Charleston earthquake he gave specific and often stereotypical descriptors of blacks as a race. Martí showed the difficulties blacks experienced in the face of white resentment in the South, but he also recorded success stories in the North. He offered reports of curious cases involving blacks in the U.S. South, without disparaging the African Americans. Martí’s call for justice is echoed in the poetry of Cuba’s national poet, Nicolás Guillén, in the twentieth century.

Chapter 13 examines the Reconstruction Era struggle for women’s rights and African American rights through the American Equal Rights Association, and the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), especially the WCTU activism of acclaimed black writer Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. Born of the so-called Woman’s Temperance Crusade of 1873–1974, under the leadership of Frances Willard, the WCTU would become the most successful woman’s organization of all time. Willard’s Do Everything campaign expanded women’s activism, both nationally and globally. Despite racial tensions within the WCTU, temperance activism provided the main avenue of political organization for women across the Reconstruction-Era South, both black and white. By the 1890s Willard had made common cause between not just temperance, equal rights, antilynching leagues, and suffragist movements, but—as a Christian socialist—with both the domestic and international labor movement as well.

This chapter discusses changes introduced by three Reconstruction-era amendments and their consequences for the census. These amendments include the suppression of slavery by the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865; the redefinition of American citizenship at the federal and state levels by the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868; and guaranteeing black men’s right to vote under the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870. These amendments had two major consequences for the census: on the one hand, the end of the Three-Fifths Compromise; on the other, the development of the census itself into the instrument of control and sanction of the limitation of former slaves’ right to vote. The 1870 census thus had to measure with much difficulty both the distribution of the population for the apportionment of seats in the House of Representatives and the enforcement of these amendments. States where the voting rights of blacks were denied would see their representation diminished accordingly.

Tourgée’s novel explores the challenges posed by the wartime abolition of slavery in the United States and the federal government’s attempt to impose a new legal order on the southern states. The Ohio-born Tourgée was an accomplished writer as well as a judge in Reconstruction North Carolina, and the novel—which is set in central North Carolina—takes up the possibilities and limits of legal reform in the wake of war. Masur argues that Bricks without Straw presents a largely pessimistic vision of law’s capacity to change deeply rooted social and political structures. Tourgée’s novel warns readers that when it comes to overcoming the legacies of slavery, the law is outmatched by white southerners’ racism and contempt. Masur situates Tourgée’s novel in the context of his political experience, which convinced him that an abstract commitment to individual rights meant little without robust federal institutions capable of protecting those rights against state and local resistance.