Slavery Did Not Die Honestly
DAVID W. BLIGHT 6:09 AM ET
... no set of problems has ever challenged the American political and moral imagination .. quite like that of the end of the Civil War and the process of Reconstruction ...
Reconstruction, traditionally defined as spanning the years 1863-1877, was one long referendum on the meaning and memory of the war and the verdict at Appomattox. The great challenge of Reconstruction was to determine how a national blood feud (approximately 750,000 deaths) could be reconciled at the same time a new nation emerged out of war and social revolution. The survivors on both sideswinners and losers in the fullest sensewould still inhabit the same land and eventually the same government. The task was harrowing: how to make sectional reconciliation compatible with emancipation, and how to square black freedom and the stirrings of racial equality with a cause (the Souths) that had lost almost everything except its unbroken belief in white supremacy ...
The radical Republicans .. believed in activist-interventionist government, in unionism, and for its time, the revolutionary strides for racial equality embodied in the Civil Rights Act of 1866, and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments ... These men and their party had overseen an unprecedented centralization of power in the federal government as a means of fighting and winning the Civil War. It is worth remembering, especially in Americas current political circumstances in the early 21st century, that these men of the first Republican Party vehemently believed in government ...
Among all the enactments of Reconstruction, none embody the lasting significance, or the heart of the conflict in this revolution and counter-revolution better than section one of the Fourteenth Amendment ...
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/10/slavery-did-not-die-honestly/411487/