Documenting United States History

304 ChapTER 12 | War and eManCipation | period Five 1844 –1877 Working with Secondary Sources^305

WorkinG WiTh SEconDAry SoUrcES

AP® Short Answer Questions

reconstructions

Historians often mark the Civil War as the turning point in the fortunes of African Ameri-

cans. Yet events that occurred during Reconstruction suggest that although the US Con-

stitution was modified to prepare for a new era for blacks, most people did not see great

improvements in their daily lives. It took many years before African Americans benefited

from the civil and economic promises of emancipation and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth

Amendments.

The presence of such unfulfilled promises during the era of Reconstruction leads

historians to consider two questions: how much was slavery really a cause of the Civil War,

and how much did winning the Civil War really serve as the turning point in the fortunes

of African Americans? You have already read various sources that illustrate some different

perspectives on African Americans during this time period. Now read the two passages

below, and consider the extent to which the Civil War marked the genuine turning point

in the fortunes of African Americans.

If blacks failed to achieve the economic independence envisioned in the after-

math of the Civil War, Reconstruction closed off even more oppressive alterna-

tives than the Redeemers’ New South. The post-Reconstruction labor system

embodied neither a return to the closely supervised gang labor of the antebellum

days, nor the complete dispossession and immobilization of the black labor force

and coercive apprenticeship systems envisioned by white Southerners in 1865

and 1866.... As illustrated by the small but growing number of black landown-

ers, businessmen, and professionals, the doors of economic opportunity that had

opened could never be completely closed. Without Reconstruction, moreover, it

is difficult to imagine the establishment of a framework of legal rights enshrined

in the Constitution that, while flagrantly violated after 1877, created a vehicle for

future federal intervention in Southern affairs. As a result of this unprecedented

redefinition of the American body politic, the South’s racial system remained

regional rather than national, an outcome of great importance when economic

opportunities at last opened in the North.

— eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (new York:

harper and row, 1998)

This Greater Reconstruction [of the whole nation] was even more morally ambig-

uous than the lesser one [in the South]. It included not one war but three—the

Mexican War, Civil War, and War against Indian America—and while it saw the

emancipation of one non-white people, it was equally concerned with dominating

others. It included the Civil Rights Acts and the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amend-

ments, but it began with U.S. soldiers clashing with a Mexican patrol on disputed

terrain along the Rio Grande in 1846.... Always the Greater Reconstruction was

as much about control as liberation, as much about unity and power as about

equality. Indians were given roles they mostly didn’t want, and freedmen were

Period Five

184 4 –1877

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