Changes

The Reconstruction era of United States history has spawned renewed interest. It has become a critical period to study because it helps us understand the nature of political representation and the nature of democracy in moments of crisis. Coming after the Civil War, Reconstruction was the period that attempted to settle the question of the Confederate states’ re-entry into the union while also dealing with the question of the citizenship of four million Black freedpeople.  At the core of these questions were both the idea of Black voting rights and the potential service of Black politicians. Significant political leadership on both the federal and state levels would emanate emanated from the Black community. Some of the more famous of these leaders were Hiram Revels, P.B.S. Pinchback, and Robert Smalls. They would offer offered an enduring legacy in helping legislate into existence policies on education, civil rights, and economic reforms.

The story of Reconstruction had either been neglected or distorted for three or four several generations after it concluded. Much of the neglect and distortion continues, but it was to the credit of W.E.B. Du Bois and his monumental effort, Black Reconstruction in America (1935), that the record of Black politicians became clear. Against the trend of looking at their political service as disastrous and “rightfully” diminished by what Southerners called Redemption, Du Bois argues forcefully that they helped establish some of the most egalitarian political initiatives in American history. For they were ushered in during a period where democracy was expanded in ways that was as transformative as any other period for it enfranchised those who had been enslaved less than a decade earlier. For Du Bois, it would stand to reason, then, that when given the opportunity to occupy political office that they would do something different, that they would try to create a political environment that was grounded in equality instead of repression.