Racism Page 2
The Civil War
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The American Civil War (April 12, 1861 – May 26, 1865; was a civil war in the United States between the Union ("the North") and the Confederacy ("the South"), which was formed in 1861 by states that had seceded from the Union to preserve slavery in the United States. They saw this threatened slavery because of the election of Abraham Lincoln and the growing abolitionist movement in the North.The war lasted a little over four years, ending with Union victory, the dissolution of the Confederacy and the abolition of slavery, freeing four million African Americans.
While the North prevailed in the Civil War, ending slavery and giving the country a "new birth of freedom," Heather Cox Richardson argues in this provocative work that democracy's blood-soaked victory was ephemeral. The system that had sustained the defeated South moved westward and there established a foothold.
Most Americans hold basic misconceptions about the Confederacy, the Civil War, and the actions of subsequent neo-Confederates. For example, two thirds of Americans—including most history teachers—think the Confederate States seceded for “states' rights.” This error persists because most have never read the key documents about the Confederacy.
An authoritative history by the preeminent scholar of the Civil War era, The Second Founding traces the arc of the three foundational Reconstruction amendments from their origins in antebellum activism and adoption amidst intense postwar politics to their virtual nullification by narrow Supreme Court decisions and Jim Crow state laws. Today these amendments remain strong tools for achieving the American ideal of equality, if only we will take them up.
Richardson, Heather Cox. How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America (p. 10). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.
Introduction
The moment in July 1964 when Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater took the stage at the Cow Palace outside San Francisco and beamed at the cheering Republicans who had just nominated him for president is iconic—but not for the reasons we remember. Goldwater delivered the line that became a rally cry for a rising generation of conservatives in the Republican Party, saying that “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And . . . moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” But the moment did much more than galvanize activists. It marked the resurrection of an old political movement by a modern political party. In Goldwater’s time, people claiming to be embattled holdouts defending American liberty called themselves “Movement Conservatives.” A century before, their predecessors had called themselves “Confederates.” While Goldwater’s supporters in 1964 talked generally about liberty, their actual complaint was specific: the business regulation and social welfare legislation of FDR’s New Deal and Eisenhower’s Middle Way had trampled their rights. In the wake of the Great Depression, the U.S. government had focused on creating economic economic security and equality of opportunity. These widely popular policies became known as the “liberal consensus,” because most Americans agreed that government should protect the country’s most vulnerable citizens and regulate the economy. Movement Conservatives, however, maintained that the liberal consensus was destroying America. People should be free to operate however they wished, without interference from government bureaucrats and regulations.
Loewen, James W.; Sebesta, Edward H.. The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader: The "Great Truth" about the "Lost Cause" (p. 3). University Press of Mississippi. Kindle Edition.
Introduction
Anyone who knows the history of the Civil War and its aftermath and who talks with members of the public quickly grows frustrated. Most recent high school graduates, many history and social studies teachers, and even some professional historians whose training is in other areas hold basic misconceptions about the era. Questions about why the South seceded, what the Confederacy was about, and the nature and later use of its symbols and ideology often give rise to flatly untrue “answers.” In turn, these errors persist because most Americans do not know and have never read key documents in American history about the Confederacy. The documents included here also make a case for teaching every American the word and the concept “historiography.” Most concisely, historiography means “the study of history,” but not just “studying history.” Historiography asks us to scrutinize how a given piece of history came to be written. Who wrote it? When? With whom were they in debate? What were they trying to prove? Who didn’t write it? What points of view were omitted? Especially on the subjects of slavery, secession, and race—the core of this volume—Confederate and neo-Confederate statements change depending upon where people wrote or spoke, and when and why. Why did Confederates say they seceded for slavery in 1861 but not in 1891? Why did neo-Confederates claim in 1999, but not in 1869, that thousands of African Americans served in the Confederate armed forces? Teachers can use questions like these to get students to understand and do historiography on the documents in this collection.
Foner, Eric. The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution (p. 1). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.
Introduction
Origins of the Second Founding. The profound changes that American society experienced during the Civil War and Reconstruction and how they reshaped the Constitution and the broad legal and political culture cannot be understood without reminding ourselves of the status of African-Americans when the war began. There were a little under four million slaves and half a million free blacks in the United States in 1860. Slavery was politically powerful and economically thriving. Slave-grown cotton was by far the nation’s most important export, and the profits generated by slavery enriched not only planters in the South but also merchants, manufacturers, and bankers in the free states. Slavery’s growth and power depended, in part, on protections provided by the Constitution. In 1787, at the time of the Constitutional Convention, around 700,000 slaves lived in the United States. They made up 40 percent of the population of the states from Maryland to Georgia. Of the fifty-five delegates nearly half, including a number of northerners, possessed slaves. George Washington, who presided, owned over two hundred, three of whom accompanied him to Philadelphia, where the convention took place. The Constitution did not mention the word “slavery,” but clearly referred to slaves in such circumlocutions as “other persons” and “person held to service or labor.” Nonetheless, many of the framers, including slaveholders from the Upper South, hoped that the institution would eventually die out, and they successfully resisted efforts to place an explicit national recognition of property in man in the document.