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African-Americans and Reconstruction
Freedmen's Bureau History
Civil War and Reconstruction
In the years following the Civil War, the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen,
and Abandoned Lands (the Freedmen's Bureau) provided assistance to tens of thousands of former slaves and impoverished whites
in the Southern States and the District of Columbia. The war had liberated nearly four million slaves and destroyed the region's
cities, towns, and plantation-based economy. It left former slaves and many whites dislocated from their homes, facing starvation,
and owning only the clothes they wore. The challenge of establishing a new social order, founded on freedom and racial equality,
The Bureau was established in the War Department in 1865 to undertake the
relief effort and the unprecedented social reconstruction that would bring freedpeople to full citizenship. It issued food
and clothing, operated hospitals and temporary camps, helped locate family members, promoted education, helped freedmen legalize
marriages, provided employment, supervised labor contracts, provided legal representation, investigated racial confrontations,
settled freedmen on abandoned or confiscated lands, and worked with African American soldiers and sailors and their heirs
to secure back pay, bounty payments, and pensions.
Recommended Reading: Inhuman
Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World. Description: Winner of a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award, David Brion
Davis has long been recognized as the leading authority on slavery in the Western World. Now, in Inhuman Bondage, Davis sums up a lifetime of insight in this definitive account of New World
slavery. The heart of the book looks at slavery in the American South, describing black slaveholding planters, rise of the
daily life of ordinary slaves, highly destructive slave trade, sexual exploitation of slaves, emergence of an African-American
culture, abolition, abolitionists, antislavery movements, and much more. Continued below…
centered on the United States, the book offers a global perspective spanning four continents. It
is the only study of American slavery that reaches back to ancient foundations and also traces the long evolution of anti-black
racism in European thought. Equally important, it combines the subjects of slavery and abolitionism as very few books do,
and it connects the actual life of slaves with the crucial place of slavery in American politics, stressing that slavery was
integral to America's success as a nation--not
a marginal enterprise. This is the definitive history by a writer deeply immersed in the subject. Inhuman Bondage offers a
compelling portrait of the dark side of the American dream.
Recommended Reading: The SLAVE
TRADE: THE STORY OF THE ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE: 1440 - 1870. School Library
Journal: Thomas concentrates
on the economics, social acceptance, and politics of the slave trade. The scope of the book is amazingly broad as the author
covers virtually every aspect of the subject from the early days of the 16th century when great commercial houses were set
up throughout Europe to the 1713 Peace Treaty of Utrecht, which gave the British the right
to import slaves into the Spanish Indies. The account includes the anti-slavery patrols of the 19th century and the final
decline and abolition in the early 20th century. Continued below...
Through the skillful weaving of numerous official reports, financial documents, and firsthand accounts, Thomas explains
how slavery was socially acceptable and shows that people and governments everywhere were involved in it. This book is a comprehensive
study from African kings and Arab slave traders to the Europeans and Americans who bought and transported them to the New World. Despite the volatility
of the subject, the author remains emotionally detached in his writing, yet produces a highly readable, informative book.
A superb addition and highly recommended.
Recommended Reading: Frederick
Douglass : Autobiographies : Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave / My Bondage and My Freedom /
Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (Library of America)
(Hardcover: 1100 pages). Review From Library Journal:
Douglass (1818-95), a former slave, rose to become an abolitionist, writer, and orator. In this collection of his autobiographical
writings, edited by Gates (humanities, Harvard Univ.), he gives an extensive overview of his life. The work includes Narrative of the
Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845); My Bondage and My Freedom (1855); and Life and Times of Frederick Douglass
(1881). Continued below...
Douglass comments on his birth, his parentage, his two masters, and the brutality of slavery he witnessed. In Bondage, he
reflects on his childhood, life on the plantation, and his runaway plot. Life and Times concludes the trilogy: it covers his
early life as a slave, his escape from bondage, and his connection with the antislavery movement. This massive volume containing
Douglass's seminal works is highly recommended for black history collections.
Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction. Description:
In Forever Free, Eric Foner, the leading historian of America's
Reconstruction Era, reexamines one of the most misunderstood periods of American history: the struggle to overthrow slavery
and establish freedom for African Americans in the years before, during, and after the Civil War. Forever Free is extensively
illustrated, with visual essays by scholar Joshua Brown discussing the images of the period alongside Foner's text. (From
Publishers Weekly: Starred Review.) Probably no period in American history is as controversial, as distorted by myth and as
"essentially unknown" as the era of emancipation and Reconstruction, award-winning historian Foner (The Story of American
Freedom; Reconstruction; etc.) argues in this dense, rectifying but highly readable account. His analysis of "that turbulent
era, its successes and failures, and its long-term consequences up until this very day" addresses the debates among historians,
corrects the misrepresentations and separates myth from fact with persuasive data. Continued below…
Foner opens his work with an overview
of slavery and the Civil War and concludes with a consideration of the Civil Rights movement and the continuing impact of
Reconstruction upon the current political scene, a framework that adds to the clarity of his history of that era, its aftermath
and its legacy. Joshua Brown's six interspersed "visual essays," with his fresh commentary on images from slavery through
Reconstruction to Jim Crow, buttress Foner's text and contribute to its accessibility. In his mission to illuminate Reconstruction's
critical repercussions for contemporary American culture, Foner balances his passion for racial equality and social justice
with disciplined scholarship. His book is a valuable, fluid introduction to a complex period.
Recommended Reading: Reconstruction:
America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877.
Review: This "masterful treatment of one of the most
complex periods of American history" (New Republic)
made history when it was originally published in 1988. It redefined how Reconstruction was viewed by historians and people
everywhere in its chronicling of how Americans -- black and white -- responded to the unprecedented changes unleashed by the
war and the end of slavery. This "smart book of enormous strengths" (Boston Globe) has since gone on to become the classic
work on the wrenching post-Civil War period -- an era whose legacy reverberates still today in the United States. Continued below...
the Author: Eric Foner, DeWitt Clinton Professor
of American History at Columbia University, is the author of numerous
works on American history, including Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil
War; Tom Paine and Revolutionary America; and The Story of American Freedom. He has served as president of both the Organization
of American Historians and the American Historical Association, and has been named Scholar of the Year by the New York Council
for the Humanities.
Reading: A Short History of Reconstruction. Review: In an attempt to document the important issues of reconstruction, Eric Foner compiled
his book Reconstruction: America's Unfinished
Revolution, 1863-1877. Foner addresses all the major issues leading up reconstruction, and then finishing his book shortly
after the end of reconstruction and the election of Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876. In
the preface of his book, Foner discusses the historiography of Reconstruction. He notes that during the early part of the
twentieth century many historians considered Reconstruction as one of the darkest periods of American history. Foner notes
that this viewpoint changed during the 1960s as revisionists shed new "light" on reconstruction. The revisionists saw Andrew
Johnson as a stubborn racist, and viewed the Radical Republicans as "idealistic reformers genuinely committed to black rights."
The author notes that recent studies of reconstruction argue that the Radicals were actually quite conservative, and most
Radicals held on to their racist views and put up very little fight as the whites once again began to govern the south. Continued
describes the African-American experience during the Civil War and Reconstruction. He argues that African-Americans were not
simply figures that took little or no action in the events of the day, and notes the enlistment of thousands of African-Americans
in the Union army during the war. Foner also notes that many of the African-Americans that eventually became civil leaders
had at one time served in the Union Army. He states, "For men of talent and ambition, the army flung open a door to advancement
and respectability." He notes that as reconstruction progressed, African-Americans were the targets of violence and racism. Foner
believes that the transition of slaves into free laborers and equal citizens was the most drastic example of change following
the end of the war. He notes how African-Americans were eventually forced to return to the plantations, not as slaves but
as share croppers, and were thus introduced to a new form of slavery. He argues that this arrangement introduced a new class
structure to the South, and states "It was an economic transformation that would culminate, long after the end of Reconstruction,
in the consolidation of a rural proletariat composed of a new owning class of planters and merchants, itself subordinate to
Northern financiers and industrialists.” The author illustrates how both blacks and whites struggled to use the state
and local governments to develop their own interests and establish their respective place in the evolving social orders. Another
theme that he addresses in this excellent study is racism itself and the interconnection of race and class in the South.
he addresses is the expanded presence of federal authority, as well as a growing idea and commitment to the idea that equal
rights belonged to all citizens, regardless of race. Foner shows how both Northern and Southern blacks embraced the power
to vote, and, as Reconstruction ended, many blacks saw the loss of suffrage and the loss of freedom. Foner illustrates that
because the presence of blacks at the poll threatened the established traditions, corruption increased, which helped to undermine
the support for Reconstruction. The former leaders of the Confederacy were barred from political office, who were the regions
"natural leaders," a reversal of sympathies took place which portrayed the Southern whites as victims, and blacks unfit to
affected the North as well, but argues that it was obviously less revolutionary than it was in the South. Foner notes that
a new group of elites surfaced after the war, industrialists and railroad entrepreneurs emerged as powerful and influential
leaders alongside the former commercial elite. The Republicans in the North did attempt to improve the lives of Northern blacks.
However, there were far fewer blacks in the North, so it was more difficult for blacks to have their agendas and needs addressed
in the local legislatures. He states, "Most Northern blacks remained trapped in inferior housing and menial and unskilled
jobs." Foner adds that the few jobs blacks were able to acquire were constantly being challenged by the huge influx of European
is definitely worthy of his original volume. Reconstruction is a subject that can still be interpreted in several ways, including
the revisionist school of thought. Foner, however, seems to be as objective as possible on this subject, and has fairly addressed
all major issues that apply.