Reconstruction Documentary

The Promise and Collapse of Reconstruction

On June 17, 2015, a white man entered a Bible study in Charleston, South Carolina, and carried out a massacre.

This is a screenshot of a CNN broadcast showing the victims of the massacre.

The documentary opens there for a reason.

A century and a half later, we are still haunted by the collapse of Reconstruction.

Reconstruction began as a period of extraordinary excitement. After Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox on April 9, 1865, Americans had the chance to become fully free. Legions of enslaved people had already defied their masters and fled to Union lines, and 180,000 Black men, mostly former slaves, joined the military. Their service was crucial to emancipation.

Then Lincoln was assassinated.

Andrew Johnson became the first president made by an assassin’s bullet. Frederick Douglass doubted him: “No matter what else Andrew Johnson is, he is no friend of the black.”

For many freed people, true freedom meant owning land. The Freedmen’s Bureau had land to distribute, but its budget was little more than the cost of one week of fighting the war.

Johnson then pardoned many former Confederates and began selling land back to them. Labor contracts followed, essentially selling people back to their former owners.

The United States had a chance to make former slaves economically independent.

It failed.

Then came the Black Codes. They acknowledged slavery’s end while ensuring as little changed as possible. Vagrancy laws fined or forced into labor contracts any Black person deemed idle, and families lost their children.

Violence followed. 

This is an illustration of the riot-burning of a Freedmen's School-House.

In Memphis, white mobs hunted Black residents, burned every Black church and school, and killed 48 people. Only two of the dead were white. The violence ran one way: white residents killed Black residents, never the reverse.

Survivors’ testimony pushed Republicans to act with the 14th Amendment, granting citizenship to everyone born in the US.

In 1867, Congress imposed military Reconstruction, requiring rebel states to adopt new constitutions granting Black men the vote. By year’s end, more than 80 percent of Black men were eligible.

Historian Eric Foner reminds us that a new society had to be built, and racism did not vanish with slavery.

This is a photo of Eric Foner.

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AI Disclosure: AI was used heavily in this assignment, as I gave the AI assistant Claude the notes I took while watching a documentary in class about Reconstruction after the Civil War. I asked Claude to format my notes into a professional blog post, using only my notes and no outside research whatsoever.