Sarah Gibbard Cook
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Reconstruction Through a Different Lens

2/1/2021

6 Comments

 
I have been watching the PBS documentary “Reconstruction: America After the Civil War” by Henry Louis Gates. It shows a different picture from what I learned in West Virginia public schools long ago.

The Reconstruction of our textbooks was an era of military repression imposed on the devastated South by Radical Republicans bent on revenge. Greedy carpetbaggers from the North pushed former slaves into positions of power for which they had no relevant experience. Southern recovery began only after the North finally withdrew its troops.

Was it all a pack of lies? No; it was partly true, but not the whole truth. We viewed that era through the lens of poor Appalachian whites, resentful of Virginia’s ruling plantation owners. The lens of former slaves scarcely occurred to us: their urgent search for loved ones sold away under slavery, their thirst for education, their pursuit of opportunities, their hopes raised and later dashed.

To tell the whole truth is impossible. Life is too short, and you'll always have a selective lens. Which omissions matter? Perhaps the test of what you leave out is what happens when you add it back in. Does it merely add detail to the picture you already had, or does it change how you see the picture overall? In the case of Reconstruction, I am past due for a different set of lenses, or perhaps a whole new prescription.

Images: (left) ruins of Richmond after the Civil War; (middle) Thomas Nast cartoon of a carpetbagger; (right) fraternity raising Confederate flag at West Virginia University, 1967. 
6 Comments
Rebecca link
2/2/2021 01:23:50 pm

Thanks for the recommendation of the documentary. In reading about the first Black members of Congress, they brought an important perspective to the proceedings.

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Sarah Cook link
2/3/2021 06:42:01 am

And sadly, all I learned about them in school was that the carpetbaggers manipulated them into such positions to punish the whites.

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Connie Gill
2/2/2021 01:43:23 pm

I recently learned about Black Codes following the Civil War and the indirect continuation of slavery. I had never learned about it in school.

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Sarah Cook link
2/3/2021 06:40:22 am

Hiring out of convict labor, with "vagrancy" enough to get one arrested, pretty much continued slavery and still does in some states. (The amendment abolishing involuntary servitude made an exception for punishment of a crime.) Nope, I never learned that in school either.

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Malcolm Reid ... Cousin Malc! link
2/7/2021 02:55:42 pm

Wasn't perhaps the contiuation of the schoolroom 'Reconstruction' lesson ... taking in 'Birth of a Nation' with a good teacher or ciné-club? Vive le cinéma| -- MALC (Also a fan of Professor Gates, Sarah)

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Sarah Cook link
2/9/2021 07:11:40 am

Hi, Malc! I have never watched Birth of a Nation in full, nor - in spite of having history teachers who were excellent in many ways - had a teacher who would have taught it well. Have seen enough clips to be horrified, of course. One commentator noted that it was so popular because of its amazing cinematography, powerful use of a novel medium - and compared it to social media today, another novel medium that pulls people in to promote messages of hate.

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    I'm a historian who writes novels and literary nonfiction. My home base is Madison, Wisconsin. 

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