David Blight on Reconstruction

“The great challenge of Reconstruction was to determine how a national blood feud could be reconciled at the same time a new nation emerged out of war and social revolution…The task was harrowing: how to make the logic of sectional reconciliation compatible with the logic of emancipation, how to square black freedom and the stirrings of racial equality with a cause (the South’s) that had lost almost everything except its unbroken belief in white supremacy.”

In the immediate aftermath of the war, defeated and prostrate, it appeared to many that white Southerners would accept virtually any conditions or terms laid upon them. This was the initial conclusion of the northern journalist Whitelaw Reid, who believed that even black suffrage would be “promptly accepted”…After his Southern tour, Reid left a mixed warning to policymakers about the disposition of white Southerners in 1866. “The simple truth is,” Reid concluded, “they stand ready to claim everything, if permitted, and to accept anything, if required.”

• David Blight, historian

1. Does the textbook’s account of the goals of Reconstruction agree with Blight’s in the first paragraph? Explain.

1. What is the significance of Reid’s travelling south in 1866? What would have prompted him to leave a ‘mixed warning’ after his visit to the South? Had he travelled south four years later, would he have come to the same conclusion? Explain.

1. What was the outcome of the ‘harrowing task’ from the perspective of African-Americans and southern whites in 1876? Explain your answer.