Reconstruction – History 118: US History Since 1877

David Blight, a history professor at Yale University, is one of the nation’s leading experts on the Civil War and Reconstruction eras. This week, students in History 118 will be reading an article of Blight’s that appeared in the Journal of American History in 1989 and served as a precursor to his prize-winning book, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (2001). The article, “‘For Something Beyond the Battlefield’: Frederick Douglass and the Struggle for the Memory of the Civil War,” offers a vivid portrait of an aging and angry Douglass fighting to preserve what he believed was the central legacy of the Civil War –the promise of emancipation. Douglass, a former runaway slave who became a great abolitionist orator and writer and the most famous black American of the nineteenth century, was distraught but still defiant over what he considered the betrayals of the “new birth of freedom” that occurred after the Civil War. Students who read the article carefully will learn a great deal about the nuances of the period and should be able to answer a series of key questions. For example, how did the great orator attempt to use the 1876 dedication of a Freedmen’s Memorial Monument to Abraham Lincoln to forge what Blight described as a place for blacks within the national identity? Why did Douglass claim that “the future historian will turn to the year 1883 to find the most flagrant example of national deterioration”? What exactly was Douglass fighting against during this period? How important in the contest over defining the war’s legacy was the movement known as “The Lost Cause”? Less than a year before he died, at the age of 76, Douglass sounded an especially poignant note in what became one of his famous Dedication Day speeches. “I shall never forget the difference,” he said, “between those who fought for liberty and those who fought for slavery; between those who fought to save the Republic and those who fought to destroy it.” His frustration was palpable and remains understandable but students should ask themselves how other Americans from that period, even those sympathetic to Douglass, might have reacted to such divisive commentary.

In March 2016, historian Eric Foner came to Dickinson to discuss these issues and their legacy for modern America at a special conference on Reconstruction hosted by the House Divided Project. Here are his short comments and here is a link to the video from the entire three-day gathering.

In his fascinating article on Theodore Roosevelt’s complicated nationalism, Gary Gerstle offers students in History 118 a series of challenging ideas. First, Gerstle explains how Roosevelt saw world history in terms of race conflict and believed earnestly in a hierarchy of racial categories –an idea embraced by most people in the nineteenth century. Gerstle then offers compelling details about Roosevelt’s famous experiences with the Rough Riders in the Spanish-America War. Yet instead of focusing on the standard romantic myths about the diverse and rowdy regiment, Gerstle demonstrates how Roosevelt celebrated his fellow Rough Riders at the expense of equally heroic black troops during that brief conflict in Cuba. Students who read this article should be able to identify Presley Holliday, a remarkable man who challenged Roosevelt’s version of the war’s history. Despite Roosevelt’s reluctance to acknowledge black equality, he did reach out to selected African Americans, such as Booker T. Washington. Gerstle goes even further, arguing that what he labels Roosevelt’s “civic nationalism” was a precursor to the spirit of Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech and the modern civil rights ideal. He claims that Roosevelt was full of contradictions and that despite his belief in racial hierarchy, and his distaste for blacks and Chinese in particular, he was also a deep believer in the equality of American citizenship and the principle of the “Melting Pot.” Gerstle suggests that in this contradiction, Roosevelt embodied a Progressive Age in America that contained competing ideas of what it meant to be American. Students who need extra background on the diverse topics covered in this article should consult with the online textbook at Digital History, noting especially the chapters on Along the Color Line, Closing the Western Frontier, Huddled Masses, United States Becomes a World Power, and the Progressive Era.

Dickinson College, Fall 2023

Category: Reconstruction

David Blight on Frederick Douglass, Race and Reunion

Theodore Roosevelt and the Compexity of American Nationalism