Mystic Chords Of Memory : The Transformation Of Tradition

The end of the Civil War in 1865 was a very conflicting time for the United States. On one hand, the sanguinary struggles of the war had finally come to a close. On the other hand, the desperate desire to rebuild the damage in the South quickly became very popular. This was called Reconstruction, an era focused on changing the ethos of resisting Southerners and installing equal civil rights for all citizens. Despite how important Reconstruction was for rebuilding the American economy, this desire ultimately came to an end in 1877. Although both the North and the South played roles in this nation defeat, Northern neglect primarily killed the

After the Civil War, the South was in a state of political turmoil, social chaos, and economic decline. Contrary to popular belief, Northerners did not subject Southerners to unethical or inhumane punishment. The time post Civil War was filled with efforts toward reconstructing the South, yet there is the strong question if there even is a New South. Yes, there was somewhat of a New South economically. No, there was not a New South regarding race relations and social hierarchy. In the 1870’s, the South realized the world still looked at them as the ones who wanted slavery. There was a need to project a new image to the world and to stimulate

In “Reconstruction Revisited”, Eric Foner reexamines the political, social, and economic experiences of black and white Americans in the aftermath of the Civil War. With the help of many historian works, Foner gives equal representation to both sides of the Reconstruction argument.

Between the Age of Exploration to the end of the Civil War, the United States of America has undergone countless events, people, and ideas in which the history of the country was forever altered. However, out of all these moments in history, the American Civil War of 1861-1865, is by far the most important event in the United States. Known as the largest and most destructive conflict in American history, the Civil War brought into question what kind of nation it would become. The importance of the Civil War can be found in the conflicts, deaths, and questions that were created by this brief event in

The theme of race and reunion had become a competition for memories with vastly different aspirations between the north and the south. Striving for a reunion, a majority of American white communities close obscure the civil war racial narrative would only fade. In race and reunion: The Civil War in American memory, by David Blight, represents how Americans chose to remember the Civil War conflict, from the beginning of the turning point of the war. The two major themes race and reunion, demonstrate how white Americans adjusted and altered the causes and outcomes of the Civil War to reflect their particular ideas regarding this catastrophic conflict between Northerners and Southerners era. Blight, addresses how these differences in cultures collided in the visions that they saw America becoming when reunited as a union after the Civil War, reconciliationists, White supremacy and emancipationist. Blight does an excellent job of showing the arguments between all three versions of the Civil War. As the emancipationist image kept a firm hold amongst ex-slaves, it lost much of its white support and political power. Reconciliation became more about healing, allowing racial injustice of the supremacist movement to seep into the landscape of national healing. why do Union veterans allow the real cause of the war, slavery, to disappear from the memory of the war – Blight strives to answer. Through a culture of remembrance, veterans looked back at their experience with a sort of

Barney, William L. The Civil War and Reconstruction: A Student Companion. Oxford University Press 2003. Pgs

At the end of the Civil War, America faced the difficult task of uniting not only two separated territories of the United States, but also two races long separated by racism and culture. Devastated and embittered by the damage of the war, the South had a long way to go in order to achieve true equality between the former slave owners and former slaves. The majority of the South remained set in racist behavior, finding post-Civil War legal loopholes to diminish African American rights (Tindall & Shi, 2010, pp. 757-758). Southerners continued to marginalize Blacks in their behavior toward ex-slaves and the later African American generation,

As David Blight says in his novel, Race and Reunion, after the Civil War and emancipation, Americans were faced with the overwhelming task of trying to understand the relationship between “two profound ideas—healing and justice.” While he admits that both had to occur on some level, healing from the war was not the same “proposition” for many whites, especially veterans, as doing justice for the millions of emancipated slaves and their descendants (Blight 3). Blight claims that African Americans did not want an apology for slavery, but instead a helping hand. Thus, after the Civil War, two visions of Civil War memory arose and combined: the reconciliationist vison, which focused on the issue of dealing with the dead from the battlefields, hospitals, and prisons, and the emancipationist vision, which focused on African Americans’ remembrance of their own freedom and in conceptions of the war as the “liberation of [African Americans] to citizenship and Constitutional equality” (Blight 2).

The American Civil war is considered to be one of the most defining moments in American history. It is the war that shaped the social, political and economic structure with a broader prospect of unifying the states and hence leading to this ideal nation of unified states as it is today. In the book “Confederates in the Attic”, the author Tony Horwitz gives an account of his year long exploration through the places where the U.S. Civil War was fought. He took his childhood interest in the Civil War to a new level by traveling around the South in search of Civil War relics, battle fields, and most importantly stories. The title “Confederates in the Attic”: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War carries two meanings in Tony Horwitz’s

The United States was a very divided country between the North and the South in the 19th century. “Reconstruction was a vicious and destructive experience, a period where when vindictive Northerners inflicted humiliation and revenge on the divided south” (Brinkley 351). During the time of reconstruction, President Lincoln and Andrew Johnson had large plans for the country but shortly took a sharp turn of the unexpected, radicals put in the Black Codes and amendments into the law, and the south had “redeemed” itself and began to rebuild.

As a country, America has gone though many political changes throughout its lifetime. Leaders have come and gone, and all of them have had their own objectives and plans for the future. As history has taken its course, though, almost all of these “revolutionary movements” have come to an end. One such movement was Reconstruction. Reconstruction was a violent period that defined the defeated South’s status in the Union and the meaning of freedom for ex-slaves. Though, like many things in life, it did come to an end, and the resulting outcome has been labeled both a success and a failure.

Later in life I moved South of the Mason-Dixon line to Richmond Virginia which was the one time capital of the Confederacy. Here I learned an alternate version of history, one of states’ rights against an oppressive government. What once I knew as the War on Slavery was here called the War Against Northern Aggression

In the later half of nineteenth century America, the new nation’s original ability to resolve conflict through means of peaceful compromise had vanished. Various spans of conflict such as Westward Expansion, the Market Revolution, Sectionalism, Mexican American War, the succession of the southern states and ultimately the failure of the Compromise of 1850 that made compromise between the North and the South unattainable. It was the uncompromising differences amongst the free and slave states over the power of the national government that created a divide that would result in divisional violence. From the industrialized North, the agricultural South, Jackson’s Presidency to Lincoln’s and the rise in America 's involvement in politics that followed, slavery was merely one pawn on the board during America’s transforming years that would later reveal itself to have been the vehicle for the Civil War.

The Columbian University journalism professor Nicholas Lemann’s aim of writing this book is to look at the brutal campaign of fraud and violence during the mid-1870s that ultimately led to the restoration of conservative, white governments in some southern states. The author focuses on the reconstruction of Mississippi. He stirs memories of the murderous Southern resistance and to civil rights movements 90 years later. Lemann writes at an era when neo-Confederate sympathies have cropped up again in southern politics, and amid several reports of the suppression of the minority voting throughout the country. Mr. Lemann presents the last battle of the Civil War.

The Civil War left a country divided not only by property lines and borders but by beliefs as well. Not just religious beliefs, moral beliefs also. It left both sides, north and south struggling, trying to figure out what their next move towards reuniting the divided America was going to be. The period following the end of the Civil War would become known as the “Reconstruction Era.” An era that raised just as many questions as it did answers. A reconstruction of America that seems to carry on many decades later.