#411/#500 End of Reconstruction

Debrief on Reconstruction and simulation.

• What did you gain from this exercise?
• Were you surprised by anything that you learned, did, or observed during this exercise?
• Do you have any advice for how this exercise might be further improved?

Discuss:

• Why did Foner suggest that the two images to the right from Harper’s Weekly by the cartoonist Thomas Nash “mirrored the evolution of sentiment in the North”?
• What national issues and attitudes combined to bring an end to Reconstruction in 1877?
• How did the failure of Reconstruction policies impact black Americans?

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Thomas Nash, "And Not This Man?" in Harper's Weekly, 5 August 1865.

Thomas Nash, "Colored Rule in a Reconstructed(?) State" in Harper's Weekly, 14 March 1874.

Birth of a Nation

Read the first four paragraphs from Steven Mintz, “Birth of a Nation” prepared for the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History (external link):

In 1915, 50 years after the end of the Civil War, D.W. Griffith, released his epic film Birth of a Nation. The greatest blockbuster of the silent era, Birth of a Nation was seen by an estimated 200 million Americans by 1946.

Based on a novel by a Baptist preacher named Thomas Dixon, the film painted Reconstruction, the period following the Civil War, as a time when vengeful former slaves, opportunistic white scalawags, and corrupt Yankee carpetbaggers plundered and oppressed the former Confederacy until respectable white Southerner rose up and restored order. A "scalawag" was a southern white who supported the Republican party; a "carpetbagger" was a northern-born Republican who had migrated to the South.

The film depicted a vindictive northern Congressman, modeled on a Pennsylvania Republican member of Congress, Thaddeus Stevens, and a power-hungry mulatto eager to marry the Congressman's daughter. The film's hero is an aristocratic Confederate veteran who joins the Ku Klux Klan and at the film's climax rescues the woman from armed freedmen. President Woodrow Wilson reportedly described the film as "history written with lightning."

During the twentieth century, far more Americans probably learned about Reconstruction from Hollywood rather than from history books or lectures. Films like Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind depicted Reconstruction as a misguided attempt to overturn the South's "natural" order by giving political power to former slaves.

Next view, the following clip and consider the following questions, first with a partner, and then together as a class:

• How are the different groups of people in these clips depicted? What adjectives do you think the author of this text (D.W. Griffith, as filmmaker) might use to describe the characters in the film?
• To what extent do these scenes represent “real” events in the South? To what extent do they represent a heavily biased – or even demonstrably false – set of views?
• Steven Mintz suggests, “During the twentieth century, far more Americans probably learned about Reconstruction from Hollywood rather than from history books or lectures.” What lessons do you think Americans might have learned from the scenes in this film? Why might that be significant?

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Homework: #501