Carpetbagger's Crusade

Carpetbagger's Crusade PDF Author: Otto H. Olsen
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421430959
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 435

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Book Description
Originally published in 1965. The Supreme Court's momentous school desegregation decision of 1954 was a postmortem victory for Albion Tourgée. Just fifty-eight years earlier this once-famous carpetbagger's attack on segregation was crushed in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson. His legal defeat in 1896 typified his frustrated but prophetic career. Tourgée was an idealistic Union veteran who ventured south in 1865. As an advocate of civil rights, political equality, free schools, and penal reform, he was elected to North Carolina's Constitutional Convention of 1868. Olsen records both the fierce struggles and the impressive accomplishments that filled Tourgée's fourteen years in the South. With the collapse of the Southern experiment, Tourgée was inspired to turn to fiction to express his convictions. A Fool's Errand by One of the Fools and Bricks without Straw were classics of their day, providing absorbing accounts and defenses of radical Reconstruction. In 1879 Tourgée went north, where he renewed and extended his crusade for Negro equality by writing, lecturing, and lobbying. For many years he was the most militant and persistent advocate of racial equality in the nation. He was also a vigorous critic of the industrial age, demanding the utilization of federal power in behalf of equality, democracy, and economic justice.

Carpetbagger's Crusade

Carpetbagger's Crusade PDF Author: Otto H. Olsen
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421430959
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 435

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Book Description
Originally published in 1965. The Supreme Court's momentous school desegregation decision of 1954 was a postmortem victory for Albion Tourgée. Just fifty-eight years earlier this once-famous carpetbagger's attack on segregation was crushed in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson. His legal defeat in 1896 typified his frustrated but prophetic career. Tourgée was an idealistic Union veteran who ventured south in 1865. As an advocate of civil rights, political equality, free schools, and penal reform, he was elected to North Carolina's Constitutional Convention of 1868. Olsen records both the fierce struggles and the impressive accomplishments that filled Tourgée's fourteen years in the South. With the collapse of the Southern experiment, Tourgée was inspired to turn to fiction to express his convictions. A Fool's Errand by One of the Fools and Bricks without Straw were classics of their day, providing absorbing accounts and defenses of radical Reconstruction. In 1879 Tourgée went north, where he renewed and extended his crusade for Negro equality by writing, lecturing, and lobbying. For many years he was the most militant and persistent advocate of racial equality in the nation. He was also a vigorous critic of the industrial age, demanding the utilization of federal power in behalf of equality, democracy, and economic justice.

Those Terrible Carpetbaggers

Those Terrible Carpetbaggers PDF Author: Richard Nelson Current
Publisher: New York : Oxford University Press
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 512

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Book Description
Set within the larger context of Congressional politics and the history of individual Southern states, Current's narrative reveals a group of men who were often highly educated, almost all of whom had served with distinction in the Union Army (three were generals), and several of whom brought their own money down South to help rebuild a war-torn land. Daniel H. Chamberlain, for instance, was educated at Yale and Harvard Law School--he was described by the President of Yale as "a born leader of men"--Was governor of South Carolina, and later made a fortune as a Wall Street lawyer. Adelbert Ames, far from exploiting the black, was a leading exponent of black rights, the author of the main brief of the Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson, a major court battle against segregation. And Albion W. Tourgee, author of the best-selling A Fool's Errand, was praised after his death by W.E.B. du Bois for his efforts on behalf of the freed slaves.

Blacks, Carpetbaggers, and Scalawags

Blacks, Carpetbaggers, and Scalawags PDF Author: Richard L. Hume
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807148334
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 947

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Book Description
After the Civil War, Congress required ten former Confederate states to rewrite their constitutions before they could be readmitted to the Union. An electorate composed of newly enfranchised former slaves, native southern whites (minus significant numbers of disenfranchised former Confederate officials), and a small contingent of "carpetbaggers," or outside whites, sent delegates to ten constitutional conventions. Derogatorily labeled "black and tan" by their detractors, these assemblies wrote constitutions and submitted them to Congress and to the voters in their respective states for approval. Blacks, Carpetbaggers, and Scalawags offers a quantitative study of these decisive but little-understood assemblies -- the first elected bodies in the United States to include a significant number of blacks. Richard L. Hume and Jerry B. Gough scoured manuscript census returns to determine the age, occupation, property holdings, literacy, and slaveholdings of 839 of the conventions' 1,018 delegates. Carefully analyzing convention voting records on certain issues -- including race, suffrage, and government structure -- they correlate delegates' voting patterns with their racial and socioeconomic status. The authors then assign a "Republican support score" to each delegate who voted often enough to count, establishing the degree to which each delegate adhered to the Republican leaders' program at his convention. Using these scores, they divide the delegates into three groups -- radicals, swing voters, and conservatives -- and incorporate their quantitative findings into the narrative histories of each convention, providing, for the first time, a detailed analysis of these long-overlooked assemblies. Hume and Gough's comprehensive study offers an objective look at the accomplishments and shortcomings of the conventions and humanizes the delegates who have until now been understood largely as stereotypes. Blacks, Carpetbaggers, and Scalawags provides an essential reference guide for anyone seeking a better understanding of the Reconstruction era.

Bricks Without Straw

Bricks Without Straw PDF Author: Albion W. Tourgée
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822392348
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 466

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Book Description
A classic of American political fiction first published in 1880, a mere three years after Reconstruction officially ended, Bricks Without Straw offers an inside view of the struggle to create a just society in the post-slavery South. It is unique among the white-authored literary works of its time in presenting Reconstruction through the eyes of emancipated slaves. As a leading Radical Republican, the author, Albion W. Tourgée, played a key role in drafting a democratized Constitution for North Carolina after the Civil War, and he served as a state superior court judge during Reconstruction. Tourgée worked closely with African Americans and poor whites in the struggle to transform North Carolina’s racial and class politics. He saw the ravages of the Ku Klux Klan firsthand, worked to bring the perpetrators of Klan atrocities to justice, and fought against what he called the “counter-revolution” that destroyed Reconstruction. Bricks Without Straw is Tourgée’s fictionalized account of how Reconstruction was sabotaged. It is a chilling picture of violence against African Americans condoned, civil rights abrogated, constitutional amendments subverted, and electoral fraud institutionalized. Its plot revolves around a group of North Carolina freedpeople who strive to build new lives for themselves by buying land, marketing their own crops, setting up a church and school, and voting for politicians sympathetic to their interests, until Klan terrorism and the ascendancy of a white supremacist government reduce them to neo-slavery. This edition of Bricks Without Straw is enhanced by Carolyn L. Karcher’s introduction, which sets the novel in historical context and provides an overview of Albion W. Tourgée’s career, a chronology of the significant events of both the Reconstruction era and Tourgée’s life, and explanatory notes identifying actual events fictionalized in the novel.

The Ordeal of the Reunion

The Ordeal of the Reunion PDF Author: Mark Wahlgren Summers
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469617579
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 528

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Book Description
"For a generation, scholarship on the Reconstruction era has rightly focused on the struggles of the recently enslaved for a meaningful freedom and defined its success or failure largely in those terms. Summers goes beyond this vitally important question, focusing on Reconstruction's need to form an enduring Union without sacrificing the framework of federalism and republican democracy. This book offers a fresh explanation for Reconstruction's demise and a case for its essential successes as well as its great failures. Indeed, this book demonstrates the extent to which the victors' aims in 1865 were met--and at what cost"--

America’s Reconstruction

America’s Reconstruction PDF Author: Eric Foner
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 9780807122341
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 172

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Book Description
One of the most misunderstood periods in American history, Reconstruction remains relevant today because its central issue -- the role of the federal government in protecting citizens' rights and promoting economic and racial justice in a heterogeneous society -- is still unresolved. America's Reconstruction examines the origins of this crucial time, explores how black and white Southerners responded to the abolition of slavery, traces the political disputes between Congress and President Andrew Johnson, and analyzes the policies of the Reconstruction governments and the reasons for their demise. America's Reconstruction was published in conjunction with a major exhibition on the era produced by the Valentine Museum in Richmond, Virginia, and the Virginia Historical Society. The exhibit included a remarkable collection of engravings from Harper's Weekly, lithographs, and political cartoons, as well as objects such as sculptures, rifles, flags, quilts, and other artifacts. An important tool for deepening the experience of those who visited the exhibit, America's Reconstruction also makes this rich assemblage of information and period art available to the wider audience of people unable to see the exhibit in its host cities. A work that stands along as well as in proud accompaniment to the temporary collection, it will appeal to general readers and assist instructors of both new and seasoned students of the Civil War and its tumultuous aftermath.

Memory and Myth

Memory and Myth PDF Author: David B. Sachsman
Publisher: Purdue University Press
ISBN: 9781557534408
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 326

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Book Description
"Ain't nobody clean" : Glory! and the politics of black agency / W. Scott Poole -- Alex Haley's Roots : the fiction of fact / William E. Huntzicker -- A voice of the south : the transformation of Shelby Foote / David W. Bulla.

The Era of the Civil War--1820-1876

The Era of the Civil War--1820-1876 PDF Author: Louise A. Arnold-Friend
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : United States
Languages : en
Pages : 724

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Book Description


The Era of the Civil War--1820-1876

The Era of the Civil War--1820-1876 PDF Author: US Army Military History Research Collection
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : United States
Languages : en
Pages : 604

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Book Description


When the War Was Over

When the War Was Over PDF Author: Dan T. Carter
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807151157
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
In the months after Appomattox, the South was plunged into a chaos that surpassed even the disorder of the last hard months of the war itself. Peace brought, if anything, an increased level of violence to the region as local authorities of the former Confederacy were stripped of their power and the returning foot soldiers of the defeated army, hungry and without hope, raided the already impoverished countryside for food and clothing. In the wake of the devastation that followed surrender, even some of the most virulent Yankee-haters found themselves relieved as the Union army began to bring a small level of order to the lawless southern terrain. Dan T. Carter's When the War Was Over is a social and political history of the two years following the surrender of the Confederacy -- the co-called period of Presidential Reconstruction when the South, under the watchful gaze of Congress and the Union army, attempted to rebuild its shattered society and economic structure. Working primarily from rich manuscript sources, Carter draws a vivid portrait of the political leaders who emerged after the war, a diverse group of men -- former loyalists as well as a few mildly repentant fire-eaters -- who in some cases genuinely sought to find a place in southern society for the newly emancipated slaves, but who in many other cases merely sought to redesign the boundaries of black servitude. Carter finds that as a group the politicians who emerged in the postwar South failed critically in the test of their leadership. Not only were they unable to construct a realistic program for the region's recovery -- a failure rooted in their stubborn refusal to accept the full consequences of emancipation -- but their actions also served to exacerbate rather than allay the fears and apprehensions of the victorious North. Even so, Carter reveals, these leaders were not the monsters that many scholars have suggested they were, and it is misleading to dismiss them as racists and political incompetents. In important ways, they represented the most constructive, creative, and imaginative response that the white South, overwhelmed with defeat and social chaos, had to offer in 1865 and 1866. Out of their efforts would come the New South movement and, with it, the final downfall of the plantation system and the beginnings of social justice for the freed slaves.