IS reconstruction in the past, present, or future?

Humanities for Wisdom

IS reconstruction in the past, present, or future?

5/7/2016

You did great during the block scheduling. The Election is going to be really interesting this Fall when you are freshman, do not forget your class brochure. This week was even more impacted than the last couple of weeks. The testing has been publicly announced as done. Remember to keep working in all your class and get sleep. We have one last notebook due on 5/27/16. Also if you missed our discussion on Cinco de Mayo as a Civil War Mexican-American celebration you should read this article. I hope to have the video working before school gets out that I wanted to show you on the May celebration. Next week we will finish the Reconstruction notes and move to Jim Crow, Gilded age, and Ghost Dance era of America.
http://newsroom.ucla.edu/stories/cinco-de-mayo-just-as-american-271607

4 Comments

Mr.C

5/9/2016 08:47:19 am

NARRATOR: Democrats took back power in Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, Arkansas, Texas. White Southerners called it "Redemption". Many of the elections were won through violence and intimidation. White Northerners did nothing to stop it.

FAUST: I think a key part of it is race, and the basic agreement, North and South, among white Americans, about the need for subordination of African Americans.

NARRATOR: Lured by the myth of the old South, Northern tourists began to flock to the moss-covered plantations of Georgia, Virginia, Florida. Travel guides suggested that whites and freedmen had learned to live together in harmony. "Nothing can be more beautiful than a cotton field," one travel writer declared, "when the snowy globes of wool are ready for picking, and the swart laborers, with sacks suspended from their shoulders, wander between the rows."

COUSHATTA AMBUSH

NARRATOR: In the summer of 1874, Marshall Twitchell went to New Orleans for the Republican state convention. His brother-in-law, Frank Edgerton, the sheriff of Coushatta, wrote him a letter warning that some of the leading men in town had formed a chapter of the White League. "The purpose of the White League," Edgerton wrote, is [the] extermination of the carpet bag element." "Nothing more nor less." Twitchell's reply was intercepted by the League and published in the local paper. He wanted to call in federal troops, he had written. But they would only come if some "overt act" were committed.

MARSTON: He needed an incident so he could bring federal troops to Coushatta. And he got an incident, but I don't think it was what he was counting on.

NARRATOR: The White League was also looking for an incident. Members staged random attacks on blacks, and when a white man was wounded in one confrontation, they had what they needed. Claiming the Twitchell clan was behind a black rebellion, they siezed Twitchell's brother, Homer, his three brothers-in-law Clark Holland, Henry Scott, and Sheriff Edgerton, and twenty of their black allies. They were forced to sign a document promising to resign and to leave Louisiana forever.

TUNNELL: The majority would like to see these people out of town, safely. After all, they have broken bread with these men. They have entertained one another. They've gone to church with one another.

NARRATOR: Escorted by guards, the white Republicans left Coushatta, carrying all their money and valuables. They headed for Texas.

TUNNELL: They haven't gone far when they look back and see a large body of thirty or forty men riding hard, closing in upon them. Out front is a heavily bearded man, sweat just streaming from his body, and as he approaches the rear guard he screams out "Get out of the way or share the prisoners' fate". The guards get out of the way; they offer no resistance. At the head of the column, the six Republicans suddenly see these men coming down upon them, and one of them screams out, "Mount and ride for your lives." And almost immediately, three of them are shot from the saddle. Homer Twitchell supposedly cried out, "Somebody give me a gun. I don't want to die like a dog." And a bullet hits him in the face a moment later.

NARRATOR: Homer and two others were killed instantly. The other three were captured and shot. All were buried in shallow graves.

MARSTON: Once they were arrested, they were going to die. They had to. Because these men would have come back with a military force the likes of which Red River Parish had never seen, and there would be military tribunals for all of the people involved in this uprising.

NARRATOR: The following morning, Twitchell got the terrible news.

TUNNELL: I imagine Twitchell reading that telegram, and reading it again, and reading it -- reading it again, thinking there's got to be some mistake. They can't all be dead. Surely some of them were simply wounded.

NARRATOR: The Coushatta massacre made headlines across the country. Many people were shocked that the violence in the South was now targeting whites.

TUNNELL: All these people who were killed were office-holders. So you've taken the public officials of Red River Parish and simply executed them. And if it can happen in Red River, it can happen every- anywhere. And for freedmen, if the White League can take white Republican officials and execute them in cold blood, what can they do to us? Nobody is safe.

NARRATOR: For weeks following the massacre, local black leaders slept in the woods at night. The massacre was part of a larger push to take back Louisiana from the Republicans. On September 14 , the White Leaguers struck in New Orleans, seizing the Republican-run legislature. President Grant was alarmed. He had been reluctant to send more troops to the South. But he could not allow this armed insurrection to go unchallenged. The next day, Grant ordered the army to occupy New Orleans. Federal troops entered the State House and forcibly removed the White League representatives, reinstating the Republi

Mr.C

5/9/2016 08:48:12 am

JOHN ROY LYNCH & THE CIVIL RIGHTS BILL

READING, JOHN ROY LYNCH:
When I leave my home to come to Washington I am treated, not as an American citizen, but as a brute. Forced to occupy a filthy railroad car with gamblers and drunkards. And for what? Not that I am unable or unwilling to pay my way; but simply because I happen to be of a darker complexion.

NARRATOR: By early 1875, John Roy Lynch was pushing for a new law protecting the right of blacks to be treated as equals in public facilities: in restaurants, on trains, in hotels and theaters. With the North fast losing interest in the troubles in the South and the economy unraveling, Lynch faced an uphill fight. Worse, the Democrats had taken back control of the U.S. House in the fall elections. Lynch and his Republican allies had only a short lame duck session to win support for the controversial Civil Rights bill.

BLIGHT: It was a remarkable bill because it had such-such a modern ring to it. At least it would to us. These were the kinds of public access issues that would later become so much a part of the modern civil rights movement of the twentieth century.

NARRATOR: The Civil Rights bill was taking on the unwritten social codes of everyday life.

WALKER: The social code is that "You are free, but you're not as free as I am free," which is to say that black people will only rise to a certain level, and there they will remain. Whites saw [the Civil Rights bill] as the opening wedge into the bugbear of nineteenth century society, and that was a belief that if you opened up these places to black people, it would open the door to racial mixing. This is the great anxiety and fear that haunts all of the discussion about civil rights during the Reconstruction period. And this fear is not only a fear in the South; it's a fear in the North also.

NARRATOR: Lynch refused to give up.

READING, JOHN ROY LYNCH: If this discrimination is to be tolerated, then I can only say that our social system is a disgrace; and our religion a complete hypocrisy.

NARRATOR: The Republicans managed to push the bill through. But it was never widely enforced.
Within a decade, the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional.

FONER: Most of Reconstruction legislation is far ahead of its time. It took another century for this country to try to live up to the ideals that were implemented temporarily in Reconstruction.

MISSISSIPPI 1875

NARRATOR: A few weeks after the Civil Rights bill passed, John Roy Lynch went back to Mississippi to campaign for re-election. He found a state in chaos. Democratic vigilantes shot at blacks in broad daylight to keep them away from the polls. Newspapers openly called for assassination. It was a full-scale, open assault on Reconstruction.

WALKER: What you have here now is the overturning of a democratic process by illegitimate means.

NARRATOR: The governor of Mississippi pleaded for help, but President Grant had learned a hard lesson in Louisiana.

AYERS: Grant refuses to help. And it's a political calculation. "No, I'm sorry. You're going to have to face this on your own." And the result of it, of course, is that the Republicans are driven from power.

NARRATOR: John Roy Lynch managed to hang on to his seat -- the only Republican, black or white, elected to Congress from Mississippi. Back in Washington, he called on the President. "It surprises me that you yielded," Lynch said to Grant. It is the first time I have ever known you to show the white feather." Grant told him that if he had sent troops to Mississippi the Republicans would have lost the White House. The General who had won the Civil War, was now close to losing the war over Reconstruction. He told Lynch: "I am very much concerned about the future of our country. What you have just passed through in Mississippi is only the beginning of what is sure to follow."

mr.C

5/10/2016 11:02:49 am

Our last day on film:

TWITCHELL ASSASSINATION ATTEMPT

NARRATOR: In the spring of 1876, Marshall Twitchell risked a brief visit to Coushatta to tend to some business.

TUNNELL: On May 1, he goes into Coushatta and finds an unusual number of prominent Democrats in town. Some kind of pow-wow is clearly going on. He asks one of them (it's late in the day), "What's everybody doing around here so late in the day? It's almost dark." And he's informed that an issue of long standing is being decided. And only afterwards will the meaning of that reply become apparent.

MARSTON: Twitchell has to be done away with. And-and maybe that will end it. Because we're at war now.

NARRATOR: The following day, Twitchell left his plantation for a meeting in town. With him was his only surviving brother-in-law, George King. They took the ferry across the river to Coushatta.

TUNNELL: Early that morning, a strangely clad man had ridden into Coushatta. He was wearing a long oilcloth coat, green eye goggles, a hat pulled down low over his face, and possibly false whiskers. He goes to the blacksmith's shop, and there he waits.

NARRATOR: As the ferry approached, the man made his way to the riverbank in full view of townspeople.

TUNNELL: Twitchell was sitting in the ferry, reading a newspaper. He looks up, sees this man pull the rifle from underneath his coat. And he screams out, "Down in the boat." Twitchell moves fast. But he gets hit in the leg before he can get over the side of the boat. His brother-in-law, George King, pulls a pistol and gets off a shot, and the rifleman above shoots him in the head and he pitches back in the boat, dead. Twitchell 's got one arm up over the gunwale of the boat. The rifleman above is a good shot and he puts two bullets in that arm. Twitchell uses his other arm. The rifleman puts two bullets in that arm. The rifleman above empties the rifle, throws it aside, pulls out a big pistol, and blazes away with that. Twitchell (he's been shot six times), he whispers to the ferryman, "Tell him I am dead." And he turns and floats face down in the water, drifting with the current. A black servant woman approaches the rifleman. She asks him if he was shooting at an alligator. And he says, "Yes, a damned black alligator."

NARRATOR: The assassin's identity was never revealed.

MARSTON: There's some speculation as to, uh, it being my great-grandfather. He was the kind of man that could have done it. If it had to be done, he would have done it.

NARRATOR: Amazingly, Twitchell survived the shooting. He was taken to a house a few miles from Coushatta, where both his arms were amputated.

READING, MARSHALL TWITCHELL: I turned my face to the window, watching the sun as it disappeared behind the trees, reviewing my past life, and trying to imagine what would be my future in the world.

NARRATOR: A delegation of local black ministers came to pay their respects.

TUNNELL: The concern of these ministers was not simply for Twitchell himself, but for all he represented. He represented this dream of a truly biracial society in which black people would be treated with respect and dignity. And he's almost a corpse now, and he becomes a metaphor for their own broken dreams.

NARRATOR: The White League in Coushatta had a very different reaction. "Our people rejoiced at it," B.W. Marston recalled, "as much as they would at the killing of any tyrant in the world."

MARSTON: Everyone was very happy that Twitchell was gone. We're still happy today that he's gone.

1877 COMPROMISE

NARRATOR: After ten tumultuous years, Reconstruction died in 1877 in a back-room deal in Washington. The outcome of the presidential election the year before had been bitterly disputed. The two parties came to a secret compromise. Southern Democrats agreed to accept a Republican in the White House. In return, the Republicans agreed to abandon Reconstruction.

WALKER: The whole Civil War and Reconstruction process had been characterized by a deep ambivalence on the part of the North. And that ambivalence by 1870's, by the late 1870's, has crystallized into, "Let's cut our losses and get out. And the best thing is to leave this to the people who know best how to handle it."

NARRATOR: B.W. Marston took Marshall Twitchell's seat as state senator.

MARSTON: The North won the war. In northwest Louisiana, we won Reconstruction.

NARRATOR: On April 24, 1877, a crowd lined the streets of New Orleans, as the last of the federal troops stationed there marched towards the steamship that would take them away. The cheers were deafening. Someone let out a rebel yell. The retreat of the North left blacks across the South feeling betrayed and deeply in danger.

WALKER: You fight a bloody war, and you set people on the road to freedom, and then when they make an effort to establish themselves, that road is pulled out from under them and they are left to the people who are their enemies.

EPILOGUE:

NARRATOR: Marshall Twitchell moved back to Vermont. Fitted with artifici

Mr.C

5/10/2016 11:08:02 am

NARRATOR: Marshall Twitchell moved back to Vermont. Fitted with artificial arms, he was made a consul to Canada in 1878. After Louisiana, he found his quiet life...unnerving. Fan Butler married an Englishman. She tried to keep the plantations afloat, but eventually gave up and moved to Britain in 1877. John Roy Lynch managed to stay in politics for another twenty years and wrote an impassioned defense of Reconstruction.. He died in Chicago in 1939. Tunis Campbell's enemies finally caught up with him. He was sent to a convict labor camp for a year, then fled Georgia. He died in Boston in 1891.

1913 ANNIVERSARIES

NARRATOR: In July 1913, more than fifty thousand Civil War veterans gathered on the battlefield at Gettysburg. Gray-bearded soldiers, North and South, joined to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the battle.

AYERS: Veterans felt a kind of bond that came from being soldiers in the war, regardless of which side they had been on. They're celebrating their youth. They're celebrating their glory, uh, bravery. They're celebrating the fact that the American nation had come back together.

NARRATOR: The poetry of the moment was irresistible; bitter enemies reconciled, a nation made whole once more. No one there seemed to notice that there were no black veterans in the crowd.

WALKER: That reunion comes at the cost of black liberty and black freedom. It also comes through a very clever process of rewriting history.

NARRATOR: The Southern legend of the Lost Cause had prevailed.

FONER: By the turn of the century, an image of Reconstruction has been fixed in the American consciousness, both North and South, as a terrible mistake, a travesty of democracy. According to this image, African Americans were given these rights they were unprepared for. Therefore there was this period of terrible mis-government.

BLIGHT: Great changes take time, and this is a great experiment in biracial democracy. But, one of the tragedies of Reconstruction is that it only lasted such a short period of time.

NARRATOR: By 1913, many of the rights won by African Americans during Reconstruction had been taken away. Segregation was the norm and lynching epidemic. But some of what they had built amid the turmoil of Reconstruction had survived -- communities, schools, and churches.

AYERS: Over the next several generations, black Americans never let up in their desire to be full American citizens.

WALKER: The idea of being a black Congressman did not die. The idea of being a black justice of the peace, or superintendent of the schools, did not die.

AYERS: That ideal of America where there was equality, of a South where there was opportunity, never died. And all across the twentieth century, and emerging in this great Civil Rights Movement, we see the legacy of Reconstruction. Took generations to play out, but it never died.

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