Several novels deserve particular mention. Thomas Dixon, The Clansman (1905), is a novel of the Ku Klux Klan's efforts to save the South. In 1944 Howard Fast wrote Freedom Road. Dixon's novel takes the side of the redeemers, whereas Fast portrays the freedmen's struggle to resist violence and build a life for themselves. Albion Tourgee was himself a carpetbagger in the South. His novel A Fool's Errand (1879) is based on understanding gained through that experience. His novel Bricks Without Straw (1880) deals more generally with social and political conditions in the South.

On another topic, The Gilded Age, written by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner in 1873, is a vigorous attack on the shallowness and falsity of the beginnings of that so-called Gilded Age.

Several fine videotapes are available. PBS Video has produced in The American Adventure Series two half-hour videotapes of quality, Reconstructing the South and The End of an Era. Also the American Social History Project has produced as part of its Who Built America? Series Dr. Toer's Amazing Magic Lantern Show, a half-hour videotape dealing with a company of players in the rural postwar South. It focuses on the meaning of freedom and the struggles of the freedmen against white oppression. Films for the Humanities and Sciences offers Abolition: Broken Promises (fifty minutes), a grim portrayal of the black experience after slavery, and Black Communities After the Civil War (seventeen minutes), about the towns that were established in northeastern Oklahoma.

D. W. Griffith's feature film Birth of a Nation (1915) is a great cinematic achievement. Based on Thomas Dixon's novel The Clansman, this powerfully dramatic film presents its racist philosophy with extraordinary effectiveness. So compelling is it that students will be particularly well served if they have an opportunity to consider and discuss the ambiance of the time about which it was made, the time during which it was made, and their own emotional reactions to it.
Document Set 16-1

Ensuring Suffrage: Equal Rights for Whom?

1. Republican Carl Schurz Urges Black Suffrage, 1865
2. George Downing and Frederick Douglass Argue the Case for Enfranchisement, 1866
3. Henry B. Blackwell Appeals to Racism in the Cause of Female Suffrage, 1867
4. Elizabeth Cady Stanton Questions Abolitionist Support for Female Enfranchisement, 1868
5. President Johnson Opposes Black Suffrage, 1867
6. Text of the Fourteenth Amendment, 1868The documents dealing with the suffrage problem and the Fourteenth Amendment will enable instructors to introduce several interpretive questions. First, the chapter focuses on the civil-rights issue as central to the Reconstruction experience, making it clear that from the outset some African-Americans and Radical Republicans were determined that the Emancipation Proclamation should end in a broader commitment to equality. Exploration of this aspiration and the response that it produced will link the political context with the social implications of the citizenship amendment.One approach might be classroom discussion of the political, economic, and social development of 1865-1866, which persuaded a broad coalition of Republican Radicals and moderates that constitutional protection of civil rights was a necessity. Classes may be divided into moderates, Radicals, blacks, and perhaps southern whites for a debate over the freedmen's place in postwar southern society.A more conventional discussion topic would focus on Radical motivation in advancing black suffrage. The documents contain adequate evidence of the arguments for African-American political participation as well as opposition views. In this instance students may use their text background in reading between the lines to gain a better understanding of the full ramifications of full suffrage.Perhaps the central question raised by these documents involves the definition of equality in the 1860s. The chapter stresses the feminist perception of equality. Reaching back for continuity to the discussion of reform in Chapter 10, these documents remind students of the link between feminism and abolitionism. Instructors will need to provide introductory material on the suffragists' drive for enfranchisement, which is also discussed in the text. The OAH-FIPSE women's history materials will be useful in preparing for this discussion. By highlighting Elizabeth Cady Stanton's attack on the abolitionists, instructors can use the documents to emphasize the feminists' great disappointment when their former allies decided to defer the goal of female enfranchisement.Finally, these documents can provide students with a glimpse of things to come if they speculate on the future significance of the Reconstruction amendments. Instructors may introduce the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments as guarantees of equal political opportunity, following up with an inquiry into the consequences over the ensuing century. Students may work from the amendments toward an understanding of the reasons why they were inadequate protections for African-Americans in the years ahead.

Recommended Readings for Document Set 16-1


Herman Belz. Emancipation and Equal Rights: Politics and Constitutionalism in the Civil War Era (1978).

Michael Les Benedict. A Compromise of Principle: Congressional Republicans and Reconstruction (1974).

LaWanda Cox and John H. Cox. "Negro Suffrage and Republican Politics: The Problem of Motivation in Reconstruction Historiography." Journal of Southern History 33 (Aug. 1967): 303-330.

Michael Kent Curtis. No State Shall Abridge (1985).

Ellen Carol DuBois. Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women's Movement in America, 1848-1869 (1978), especially Chapters 2 and 6.

Eric Foner. Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (1988).

William Gillette. The Right to Vote: Politics and the Passage of the Fifteenth Amendment (1965).

Joseph B. James. The Framing of the Fourteenth Amendment (1956).

William S. Nelson. The Fourteenth Amendment (1988).

Elizabeth Pleck et al. Restoring Women to History: Materials for United States II (1984).
Audiovisual Resources for Document Set 16-1


Civil War and Reconstruction (laserdisc). Zenger Media, 10200 Jefferson Boulevard, Culver City, Calif. 90232-0802.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the Early Women's Rights Movement (audiotape--30 min.). Audiotape Program 18, Annenberg/CPB Project Legacies Series. Annenberg/CPB Project, 1111 16th Street, NW, Washington, D.C. 20036.

Half Slave, Half Free, Part 2: Charlotte Forten's Mission: Experiment in Freedom (videotape--120 min.). Reference and Loan Library, Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, 125 South Webster Street, Madison, Wis. 53702.

Reconstruction--A Changing Nation, 1865-1880 (film--24 min.). Graphic Curriculum, Inc., P.O. Box 565, Lenox Hill Station, New York, N.Y. 10021.

Years of Reconstruction (film--25 min.). McGraw-Hill Textfilms, 330 W. 42d Street, New York, N.Y. 10018.
Document Set 16-2

"Free at Last": The Black Response to Emancipation

1. The Louisiana Black Code, 1865
2. A Planter's Wife Recalls the African-American Response to Emancipation, 1865
3. African-American Testimony on the Aftermath of Enslavement, 1866
4. James D. B. DeBow Expresses Southern Skepticism of the Freedmen's Bureau, 1866
5. African-American Recollections of Freedom's Impact: Mingo White and Charles Davenport
6. A Freedman Recalls a Visit from the Ku Klux Klan, 1871Instructors will find that students are very interested in the black response to freedom and the ultimate failure of Reconstruction. It should not be difficult to establish linkage between the issues raised in the 1860s and the modern civil-rights movement. Similarly, the Freedmen's Bureau's initiatives raise the question of the government's responsibility for social welfare. Modern society struggles to answer questions raised by Radical Republicans who were unable to achieve their goals.An effective approach to these documents involves the search for common themes. Many touch on the labor system as a critical issue that drew the attention of freedman and planter alike. Lively discussion should develop around the question of the merits and liabilities of wage labor, sharecropping, and crop liens. Students may also consider the long-term implications of the accommodation for the southern economy, as well as the social consequences for black and white southerners.Instructors will also find this document set useful in exploring the African-American role in the social, economic, and political life of the Reconstruction era. Black testimony concerning economic and political progress should be compared with white reservations about the future. And the role of the Ku Klux Klan in shaping the final settlement provides a provocative topic for discussion. A valuable instructional supplement to this chapter is D. W. Griffith's classic film Birth of a Nation (1915), which invariably stimulates debate over black involvement in the drama of Reconstruction. Moreover, it allows the instructor to introduce the film as historical document, with reference to the ideas of the Dunning school and other early-twentieth-century Americans.Finally, this document focuses on the changing African-American family and the effect of emancipation on the sexual division of labor. With some guidance from the instructor (and reference to the OAH-FIPSE instructional guide), it will be possible to better understand changing gender constructions during Reconstruction.As instructors work with this chapter, several themes will emerge. First, a revisionist interpretation of Reconstruction may be explored with students, who will become familiar with the shifting views of historians over time. Beyond this the validity of social experience as a topic of historical inquiry can be established with full analysis of the freedmen's personal lives. Finally, linkage between the documents in Set 16-1 and Set 16-2 will clarify the relationship between social and political experience.

Recommended Readings for Document Set 16-2


Dan T. Carter. When the War Was Over: The Failure of Self-Reconstruction in the South, 1865-1867 (1985).

Robert Cruden. The Negro in Reconstruction (1969).

Eric Foner. Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (1988).

John Hope Franklin. "Birth of a Nation: Propaganda as History." Massachusetts Review 20 (Autumn 1979): 417-434.

Herbert Gutman. The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom (1976).

Tera W. Hunter. To 'Say My Freedom': Southern Black Women's Lives and Labors After the Civil War (1997).

Jacqueline Jones. Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present (1985).

Leon Litwack. Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (1979).

George C. Rable. But There Was No Peace: The Role of Violence in the Politics of Reconstruction (1984).

Allen Trelease. White Terror: The Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction (1971).
Audiovisual Resources for Document Set 16-2


Birth of a Nation (feature film, 1915--102 min.). Numerous vendors.

Civil War: Promise of Reconstruction (film--29 min.). Learning Corporation of America, 711 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10019.

Dr. Toer's Magic Lantern Show (videotape--25 min.). American Social History Project Film Library, 22D Hollywood Avenue, Ho-Ho-Kus, N.J. 07423.

Life After Slavery (audiocassette tape--20 min.). Vital History Cassettes, no. 1 (June 1979). Grolier Educational Corporation, Danbury, Conn.

Slave Voices: Things Past Telling (audiocassette tape--30 min.). National Public Radio Cassettes, NPR Customer Service, P.O. Box 55417, Madison, Wis. 53705.
Document Set 16-3

Redemption and Salvation: The Reconstruction Experiment Abandoned

1. The Atlanta News Advocates Violence to Redeem the South, 1874
2. Senator Blanche K. Bruce Alleges Fraud and Violence in Mississippi, 1876
3. South Carolina Governor D. H. Chamberlain Attacks President Hayes's Betrayal of Southern Republicans, 1877
4. A Texas Shares Contract Creates the Structure for Economic Bondage, ca. 1860s
5. Frederick Douglass Assesses the Post-Reconstruction Economic Settlement, 1883
6. Ida B. Wells Denounces Southern Social Control, 1895
7. The Economic Consequences of Redemption in Statistical Terms, 1880-1900This unit offers an opportunity for students to reflect seriously on the long-term consequences of the post-Reconstruction settlement in the South. It will not be difficult for students to grasp the importance of past-present linkage as they assess the results of redemption, especially for the African-American people of the South, whose interests and needs were deemed less important than intersectional reconciliation. A thoughtful reading and analysis of the documents should prepare students to understand the subsequent development of the southern social and economic system.Instructors might open discussion with a searching exploration of the concept of redemption and salvation. Many students will respond to these terms in light of their own religious backgrounds. When asked to consider the powerful implications of these value-laden terms, students are likely to recognize the significance of rhetoric in defining the boundaries of New South social discourse, as well as the outlines of post-Reconstruction historiography. This discussion will enable instructors to help students understand the historian's process and the establishment of historical interpretations.Another useful line of analysis would involve student response to a rhetorical assertion that African-Americans were adequately protected by the civil-rights amendments and the right to vote. The documents contain ample evidence that many forces, some of them not explicitly political, combined to institutionalize a harshly repressive social climate in the late nineteenth-century South. Students could be asked to create a list of the extralegal influences and informal social sanctions that underlay the structure of white supremacy in the New South.This discussion is certain to raise the issue of sharecropping, the crop lien system, and informal economic sanctions as tools for maintaining social control. The documents contain numerous references to economic sanctions, including a sample shares contract. Student teams might debate the disadvantages and benefits of the evolving southern land system. Discussion could begin with the question of individual economic benefits, but the instructor might introduce the broader implications for the future of the South's uneasy economic compromise. As with the question of lynching, discussion of black economic subservience can lead toward better student comprehension of the interrelatedness of past and present.

Recommended Readings for Document Set 16-3


Edward L. Ayers. Promise of the New South (1992).

Michael Les Benedict. "Southern Democrats in the Crisis of 1876-1877," Journal of Southern History 66 (November 1980): 489-524.

William Cohen. At Freedom's Edge: Black Mobility and the Southern White Quest for Racial Control (1991).

William Gillette. Retreat from Reconstruction, 1869-1879 (1980).

Michael Perman. The Road to Redemption: Southern Politics, 1869-1879 (1984).

Roger L. Ransom and Richard Sutch. One Kind of Freedom: The Economic Consequences of Emancipation (1977).

Edward Royce. The Origins of Southern Sharecropping (1993).

Peter Wallenstein. From Slave South to New South (1987).

C. Vann Woodward. Reunion and Reaction: The Compromise of 1877 and the End of Reconstruction (rev. ed., 1956).

Gavin Wright. Old South, New South (1986).
Audiovisual Resources for Document Set 16-3


Goin Back to T-Town (video--60 min.). PBS Video, 1320 Braddock Place, Alexandria, Va. 22314-1698.

Ida B. Wells: A Passion for Justice (videotape--60 min.). PBS Video, 1320 Braddock Place, Alexandria, Va. 22314-1698.