I am still reading the book “Grant” by Ron Chernow published in 2017. I find it a fascinating detailed account and difficult to speed read or even jump ahead. Having just finished the part where Ulysses Grant finished his second term as President I had no idea of the Reconstruction and military rule that he oversaw following the end of the Civil War.
As Chernow writes: “Americans today know little about the terrorism that engulfed the South during Grant’s presidency. It has been suppressed by a strange national amnesia. The Klan’s ruthless reign is a dark, buried chapter in American history. The Civil War is far better known than its brutal aftermath. Without knowing that history it is easy to find fault with Grant’s tough, courageous actions.
......To protect blacks, Grant had been forced to send in federal troops whose presence provoked a virulent reaction among southern whites who believed their states had been invaded by hated Yankees a second time.
.......Reconstruction was a fine but ultimately doomed experiment in American life. The tragedy of this intractable issue was that there was finally no way for blacks to enjoy their rights without a prolonged military presence, and that became politically impossible.
....... Once Reconstruction collapsed, it left southern blacks for eighty years at the mercy of Jim Crow segregation, lynchings, poll taxes, literacy tests and other tactics designed to segregate them from whites and deny them the vote.
....... After 1877, the black community in the South steadily lost ground until a rigid apartheid separated the races completely, a terrible state of affairs that would not be fixed until the rise of the civil rights movement after World War II.”
Powerful words to be contemplated as I continue these travels visiting the sites of the American Civil War.
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