Yale University's Slavery Past

Yale Press reports that "Honesty must be basis for slavery dialogue," on Monday, October 30, 2006:

A portion of this pane once depicted slaves (beneath the figure of John C. Calhoun) but has since been replaced with the colored glass in the bottom left corner.(Yale Press)

Brown University’s recent report on that university’s ties to 18th-century slavery should make any socially conscious Yalie stop and think. Yale, like Brown, was a product of that same colonial era, and members of Yale’s founding generations almost certainly had similar involvement with slavery, either as slave owners or as merchants benefiting indirectly from slave labor.

After library employees in the early 1990s complained about a stained glass pane originally titled “Negro with a watermelon,” the pane was removed and replaced with the pane on the far right.(source: Yale Press)

But unlike Brown, Yale has not yet conducted a thorough and scholarly study of its past involvement in colonial slavery. In 2001, three Yale doctoral candidates, employed by Yale’s unions, produced a report arguing that nine of the 12 residential colleges were named for slave owners, but, as the News had reported at the time, some historians criticized that report for failing to provide necessary historical context.

Sterling Memorial Library’s East Asian Library contains a pane of stained glass with this depiction from Bret Harte’s poem “Heathen Chinee.” (Yale Press)

The example Brown now sets with its honest accounting of past errors is an admirable example and one that Yale, in the name of scholarship and institutional self-awareness, should consider following. Yale prides itself on fostering open and honest dialogue, but meaningful dialogue must be informed dialogue. It is time that Yale set the record straight by examining and acknowledging its own history, from the slave owners among Yale’s early professors to the decision in the 1930s to name the newly built colleges after such problematic figures as slavery advocate John C. Calhoun 1804.

A stained glass pane in Calhoun College depicts an enslaved black man and woman picking cotton. (Yale Press)

That said, we are not sure what, if anything, Yale is obliged to do in making amends for any of our institution’s past errors. The Brown report calls for building a memorial, increasing efforts to recruit students from Africa and the West Indies, and emphasizing in freshman orientation the university’s ties to slavery. But it is important to remember that every institution is very much a product of its own era — the problems in Yale’s and Brown’s history are really problems in America’s and Europe’s history. Those problems, moreover, are not limited just to slavery. Elihu Yale worked as a merchant with the British East India Company, hardly known for being a paragon of cultural sensitivity, and misogyny and anti-Semitism lingered at Yale until at least the beginning of the 20th century.

Calhoun Dining Hall, Yale University

Any decisions or actions taken after Yale knows the facts of its complicity in slavery should reflect the fact that Yale’s focus should be on fostering a healthy community on today’s campus. To the extent that slavery continues to mar the environment of our temporary home — as does, arguably, the window in the Calhoun dining hall that depicts working slaves — the Yale administration would be remiss not to address those wrongs. But Yale’s commitment to a respectful multicultural environment does not need to be based on Yale’s need to right a past wrong — diversity is beneficial in itself, a point that risks being obscured if such measures as broader recruiting are couched as justification for a potentially dirtied past.

Calhoun College Buildings

But Yale cannot acknowledge its complicity in prior wrongs until it figures out what exactly those wrongs were. It is time for Yale to follow Brown’s lead and embark on a meaningful study of slavery’s imprint on our university.

(source: Yale News -- http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/2006/oct/30/honesty-must-be-basis-for-slavery-dialogue/?print)

Exodus Black Colonization and Promised Lands

Yale History Professor David Davis explores the movement to colonize American blacks in Africa and many African-American leaders' advocacy of "returning to Africa." He argues that this must be understood in reference to the biblical Exodus from Egypt and within the context of the voluntary or involuntary "removal/freeing" of such oppressed groups as Jews, Huguenots, and others. But white demands for black colonization, whatever the motives, had the psychological effect of expatriating and "deporting" a people who played an integral part in creating America. Presented by the UC Berkeley Graduate Council. Series: "UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism presents"

Exodus Black Colonization and Promised Lands

The Evil Empire: The Confederate Cabinet

According to Yale Professor David Blight, "...both sides in this war will engage in conscription, they will create the draft for the first time in American history. The Confederates were first to do it. The first Conscription Act in American history is passed in April of 1862 by the Confederate Government. It said that all able-bodied men eighteen to thirty-five, later raised to forty-five, would be conscripted into three years of service. They allowed the hiring of a substitute, which led to the charge of elitism, which was accurate."

There were brokers and all kinds of dishonest substitutes. One man is alleged to have sold himself twenty times for the bounty that he got paid to get out. There were exemptions in the Confederate conscription--public servants, ministers, teachers, editors, nurses, factory and railroad workers, miners, and telegraph operators. Among the Confederate troops out at the front they called these people "bomb-proof" positions.

And then, worst of all, in the Confederate Conscription Law in 1863, they passed what was known as the Twenty Negro Law: if you owned twenty or more slaves you were exempt from service.

The reason for that was the deep fear setting in, in 1862 across the South, that if all these white men--eighty percent of white males in the South will be in the Army--and if all these white men left the plantations it would be black men left on the plantations running the place. Any man who had twenty or more slaves was exempt, if he chose to be. This will cause tremendous resentment in the Confederate armies and ultimately become one of the causes of desertion.

The Union Conscription Law came later, it didn't come until early '63. It drafted every able-bodied man twenty years of age to forty-five years of age. It had--its exemptions were more limited.

You could escape if you could find a substitute and pay $300; hence the charge, not inaccurate, that in the North, this "people's war," as Lincoln called it, this war to save democracy, became a rich man's war and a poor man's fight.

Generous bounties were paid if you enlisted, and in the end only about six percent of all the Union forces in the Civil War were draftees. The social pressure in some communities, since regiments were formed locally, was tremendous, especially in the first two years. Approximately 20% of all Confederates were draftees and only 6% of Union troops. (The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877: Lecture 13 Transcript, 26 Feb. 2008, Professor David Blight, Yale University)

The Confederate Cabinet

circa 1863: The Confederate President Jefferson Davis (1808 - 1889) with his cabinet and, centre, General Robert E Lee (1807 - 1870). The cabinet members left to right are - Stephan Mallory, Judah Benjamin, Leroy Pope Walker, Davis, Lee, John Regan, Christopher Memminger, Vice-President Alexander Stephens and Robert Toombs. (Photo by MPI/Getty Images)

Constitution of the Confederate States; March 11, 1861

Article I

(3) Representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned among the several States, which may be included within this Confederacy, according to their respective numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole number of free persons, including those bound to service for a term of years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three-fifths of all slaves. ,The actual enumeration shall be made within three years after the first meeting of the Congress of the Confederate States, and within every subsequent term of ten years, in such manner as they shall by law direct. The number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every fifty thousand, but each State shall have at least one Representative; and until such enumeration shall be made, the State of South Carolina shall be entitled to choose six; the State of Georgia ten; the State of Alabama nine; the State of Florida two; the State of Mississippi seven; the State of Louisiana six; and the State of Texas six.

Sec. 9. (I) The importation of negroes of the African race from any foreign country other than the slaveholding States or Territories of the United States of America, is hereby forbidden; and Congress is required to pass such laws as shall effectually prevent the same.

(2) Congress shall also have power to prohibit the introduction of slaves from any State not a member of, or Territory not belonging to, this Confederacy.

(3) The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it.

(4) No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed.

ARTICLE IV

Sec. 2. (I) The citizens of each State shall be entitled to all the privileges and immunities of citizens in the several States; and shall have the right of transit and sojourn in any State of this Confederacy, with their slaves and other property; and the right of property in said slaves shall not be thereby impaired.

(3) No slave or other person held to service or labor in any State or Territory of the Confederate States, under the laws thereof, escaping or lawfully carried into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor; but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such slave belongs,. or to whom such service or labor may be due.

(3) The Confederate States may acquire new territory; and Congress shall have power to legislate and provide governments for the inhabitants of all territory belonging to the Confederate States, lying without the limits of the several Sates; and may permit them, at such times, and in such manner as it may by law provide, to form States to be admitted into the Confederacy. In all such territory the institution of negro slavery, as it now exists in the Confederate States, shall be recognized and protected be Congress and by the Territorial government; and the inhabitants of the several Confederate States and Territories shall have the right to take to such Territory any slaves lawfully held by them in any of the States or Territories of the Confederate States.

Yale Syllabus: HIST 119

HIST 119: The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877 (Spring, 2008)
Syllabus

Professor: David W. Blight, Class of 1954 Professor of American History, Yale University

Description:

This course will explore the causes, course, and consequences of the American Civil War, from the 1840s to 1877. The primary goal of the course is to understand the multiple meanings of a transforming event in American history. Those meanings may be defined in many ways: national, sectional, racial, constitutional, individual, social, intellectual, or moral. We will especially examine four broad themes: the crisis of union and disunion in an expanding republic; slavery, race, and emancipation as national problem, personal experience, and social process; the experience of modern, total war for individuals and society; and the political and social challenges of Reconstruction. The course attempts, in several ways, to understand the interrelationships between regional, national, and African-American history. And finally, we hope to probe the depths of why the Civil War era has a unique hold on the American historical imagination.

Texts:

Bruce Levine, Half Slave and Half Free: The Roots of the Civil War. Hill and Wang.

David Blight, Why the Civil War Came. New York: Oxford University.

Charles R. Dew, Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War. University of Virginia Press.

Drew G. Faust, Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War. University of North Carolina Press.

E. L. Doctorow, The March. Random House.

Eric Foner, A Short History of Reconstruction, 1863-1877. Harper & Row.

Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, ed. by David W. Blight. Bedford Books.

Gary Gallagher, The Confederate War: How Popular Will, Nationalism, and Military Strategy Could Not Stave Off Defeat. Harvard University Press.

James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom. Oxford University Press.

Louisa May Alcott, Hospital Sketches, ed. by Alice Fahs. Bedford Books.

Michael P. Johnson, ed., Abraham Lincoln, Slavery, and the Civil War. Bedford Books.

Nicholas Lemann, Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War. Farrar Strauss Giroux.

William Gienapp, ed., Civil War and Reconstruction: A Documentary Collection. Norton.

We are using two anthologies of documents (Gienapp and Johnson). Teaching Assistants will have discretion in assigning particular documents for each week's sections, and many such documents will be especially important for use in paper assignments. James McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era is provided largely as background reading. For further background reading on the post-war period you may want to consult David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War In American Memory.

Films:

Films will be scheduled during the course: especially several episodes of the PBS series, "The Civil War." The film, "Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Civil War," will also be assigned. Selections of Civil War era poetry may also be provided at times during the course.
Requirements:

There will be two required papers of 5-6 pages each. Choices of topics and readings will be provided in each of two broad categories or sections of the course: 1) antebellum society and Civil War causation; and, 2) the military, political, and social meanings of the Civil War itself. The challenges, accomplishments, and failures of the Reconstruction era will be a significant part of a scheduled, final examination during finals week.

Grading:

Paper 1: 30%
Paper 2: 30%
Final exam: 30%
Discussion section attendance and participation: 10%

Yale University

Civil War Course, Yale University: Professor David Blight teaches History 119

If you can't attend an Ivy League University, why not learn vicariously from your computer. Here we present the Yale University Course on the Civil War Era with Professor Blight.

1. Introductions: Why Does the Civil War Era Have a Hold on American Historical
The Civil War and Reconstruction (HIST 119)

Professor Blight offers an introduction to the course. He summarizes some of the course readings, and discusses the organization of the course is discussed. Professor Blight offers some thoughts on the nature of history and the study of history, before moving into a discussion of the reasons for Americans' enduring fascination with the Civil War. The reasons include: the human passion for epics, Americans' fondness for redemption narratives, the Civil War as a moment of "racial reckoning," the fascination with loss and lost causes, interest in military history, and the search for the origins of the modern United States.

2. Southern Society: Slavery, King Cotton, and Antebellum America's "Peculiar" Region
The Civil War and Reconstruction (HIST 119)

Professor Blight offers a number of approaches to the question of southern distinctiveness. The lecture offers a survey of that manner in which commentators--American, foreign, northern, and southern--have sought to make sense of the nature of southern society and southern history. The lecture analyzes the society and culture of the Old South, with special emphasis on the aspects of southern life that made the region distinct from the antebellum North. The most lasting and influential sources of Old South distinctiveness, Blight suggests, were that society's anti-modernism, its emphasis on honor, and the booming slave economy that developed in the South from the 1820s to the 1860s.

3. A Southern World View: The Old South and Proslavery Ideology
The Civil War and Reconstruction (HIST 119)

Professor Blight lectures on southern slavery. He makes a case for viewing the U.S. South as one of the five true "slave societies" in world history. He discusses the internal slave trade that moved thousands of slaves from the eastern seaboard to the cotton states of the Southwest between 1820 and 1860. Professor Blight then sketches the contents of the pro-slavery argument, including its biblical, historical, economic, cynical, and utopian aspects.

4. A Northern World View: Yankee Society, Antislavery Ideology and the Abolition Movement
The Civil War and Reconstruction (HIST 119)

Having finished with slavery and the pro-slavery argument, Professor Blight heads North today. The majority of the lecture deals with the rise of the Market Revolution in the North, in the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s. Blight first describes the causes of the Market Revolution--the rise of capital, a transportation revolution--and then moves to its effects on the culture and consciousness of antebellum northerners. Among these effects were a riotous optimism mixed with a deep-rooted fear of change, an embrace of the notions of progress and Manifest Destiny, and the intensification of the divides between North and South.


5. Telling a Free Story: Fugitive Slaves and the Underground Railroad in Myth and Reality
The Civil War and Reconstruction (HIST 119)

Professor Blight discusses the rise of abolitionism. Blight begins with an introduction to the genre of slave narratives, with particular attention to Frederick Douglass' 1845 narrative. The lecture then moves on to discuss the culture in which antebellum reform grew--the factors that encouraged its growth, as well as those that retarded it. Professor Blight then describes the movement towards radical abolitionism, stopping briefly on colonization and gradualism before introducing the character and ideology of William Lloyd Garrison.

The Civil War and Reconstruction (HIST 119)

6. Expansion and Slavery: Legacies of the Mexican War and the Compromise of 1850
The Civil War and Reconstruction (HIST 119)

In this lecture, Professor Blight discusses some of the conflicts, controversies, and compromises that led up to the Civil War. After analyzing Frederick Douglass's 1852 Fourth of July speech and the inherent conflict between American slavery and American freedom, the lecture moves into a lengthy discussion of the war with Mexico in the 1840s. Professor Blight explains why northerners and southerners made "such a fuss" over the issue of slavery's expansion into the western territories. The lecture ends with the crisis over California's admission to statehood and the Compromise of 1850.


7. "A Hell of a Storm": The Kansas-Nebraska Act and the Birth of the Republican Party, 1854-55
The Civil War and Reconstruction (HIST 119)

Professor Blight narrates some of the important political crises of the 1850s. The lecture begins with an account of the Compromise of 1850, the swan song of the great congressional triumvirate--Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and John C. Calhoun. The lecture then describes northern opposition to the Fugitive Slave Act passed as part of the Compromise, and the publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe's classic Uncle Tom's Cabin in 1852. Professor Blight then introduces the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, the most pivotal political event of the decade, and the catalyst for the birth of the Republican party.


8. Dred Scott, Bleeding Kansas, and the Impending Crisis of the Union, 1855-58
The Civil War and Reconstruction (HIST 119)

Professor Blight continues his march through the political events of the 1850s. Blight continues his description of the aftermath of the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, describing the guerilla war that reigned in the territory of Kansas for much of 1856. The lecture continues, describing the caning of Senator Charles Sumner on the floor of the US Senate and the birth of the Republican party. The lecture concludes with the near-victory of Republican candidate John C. Fremont in the presidential election of 1856, and the passage of the Dred Scott decision in 1857.


9. John Brown's Holy War: Terrorist or Heroic Revolutionary?
The Civil War and Reconstruction (HIST 119)

Professor Blight narrates the momentous events of 1857, 1858, and 1859. The lecture opens with an analysis of the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858. Next, Blight analyzes the Dred Scott decision and discusses what it meant for northerners--particularly African Americans--to live in "the land of the Dred Scott decision." The lecture then shifts to John Brown. Professor Blight begins by discussing the way that John Brown has been remembered in art and literature, and then offers a summary of Brown's life, closing with his raid on Harpers Ferry in October of 1859.


10. The Election of 1860 and the Secession Crisis
The Civil War and Reconstruction (HIST 119)

This lecture picks off where the previous one left off, with a discussion of the legacies of John Brown. The most important thing about John Brown's raid, Professor Blight argues, was not the event itself, but the way Americans engaged with it after the fact. Next, Professor Blight discusses the election of 1860, a four-way battle won by the Republican candidate, Abraham Lincoln. In the wake of Lincoln's election, the seven states of the deep South, led by South Carolina, seceded. The lecture closes with an analysis of some of the rationales underlying southern secession.


11. Slavery and State Rights, Economies and Ways of Life: What Caused the Civil War?
The Civil War and Reconstruction (HIST 119)

Professor Blight begins this lecture with an attempt to answer the question "why did the South secede in 1861?" Blight offers five possible answers to this question: preservation of slavery, "the fear thesis," southern nationalism, the "agrarian thesis," and the "honor thesis." After laying out the roots of secession, Blight focuses on the historical profession, suggesting some of the ways in which historians have attempted to explain the coming of the Civil War. Blight begins with James Ford Rhodes, a highly influential amateur historian in the late 19th century, and then introduces Charles and Mary Beard, whose economic interpretations of the Civil War had their heyday in the 1920s and 1930s.


12. "And the War Came," 1861: The Sumter Crisis, Comparative Strategies
The Civil War and Reconstruction (HIST 119)

After finishing with his survey of the manner in which historians have explained the coming of the Civil War, Professor Blight focuses on Fort Sumter. After months of political maneuvering, the Civil War began when Confederates fired on Fort Sumter, in the harbor outside Charleston, SC. The declaration of hostilities prompted four more states--Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Arkansas--to secede. Professor Blight closes the lecture with a brief discussion of some of the forces that motivated Americans--North and South--to go to war.


13. Terrible Swift Sword: The Period of Confederate Ascendency, 1861-1862
he Civil War and Reconstruction (HIST 119)

Professor Blight discusses the expectations, advantages, and disadvantages with which North and South entered the Civil War. Both sides, he argues, expected and desired a short, contained conflict. The northern advantages enumerated in this lecture include industrial capability, governmental stability, and a strong navy. Confederate advantages included geography and the ability to fight a defensive war. Professor Blight concludes the lecture with the Battle of Bull Run, the first major engagement of the war.

14. Never Call Retreat: Military and Political Turning Points in 1863
The Civil War and Reconstruction (HIST 119)

Professor Blight lectures on the military history of the early part of the war. Beginning with events in the West, Blight describes the Union victories at Fort Donelson and Fort Henry, introduces Union General Ulysses S. Grant, and narrates the horrific battle of Shiloh, fought in April of 1862. Moving back East, the lecture describes the Union General George McClellan's abortive 1862 Peninsula campaign, which introduced the world to Confederate General Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson. The lecture concludes with Confederate General Robert E. Lee's decision to take the battle to the North.

Professor Blight, Yale: US History 119

15. Lincoln, Leadership, and Race: Emancipation as Policy
The Civil War and Reconstruction (HIST 119)

Professor Blight follows Robert E. Lee's army north into Maryland during the summer of 1862, an invasion that culminated in the Battle of Antietam, fought in September of 1862. In the wake of Antietam, Abraham Lincoln issued his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, a document that changed the meaning of the war forever. Professor Blight suggests some of the ways in which Americans have attempted to come to grips with the enigmatic Lincoln, and argues that, in the end, it may be Lincoln's capacity for change that was his most important characteristic. The lecture concludes with the story of John Washington, a Virginia slave whose concerted action suggests the central role American slaves played in securing their own freedom.


16. Days of Jubilee: The Meanings of Emancipation and Total War
The Civil War and Reconstruction (HIST 119)

This lecture focuses on the process of emancipation after the passage of the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. The Proclamation, Professor Blight suggests, had four immediate effects: it made the Union army an army of emancipation; it encouraged slaves to strike against slavery; it committed the US to a policy of emancipation in the eyes of Europe; and it allowed African Americans to enlist in the Union Army. In the end, ten percent of Union soldiers would be African American. A number of factors, Professor Blight suggests, combined to influence the timing of emancipation in particular areas of the South, including geography, the nature of the slave society, and the proximity of the Union army.


17. Homefronts and Battlefronts: "Hard War" and the Social Impact of the Civil War
The Civil War and Reconstruction (HIST 119)

Professor Blight begins his lecture with a description of the sea change in Civil War scholarship heralded by the Social History revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. Along with a focus on the experience of the common solider, women, and African Americans, a central component of this shift in scholarly emphasis was an increased interest in the effects of the war on the Union and Confederate home fronts. After suggesting some of the ways in which individual Americans experienced the war, Professor Blight moves to a discussion of the war's effect on industry and economics, North and South. The lecture concludes with a description of the increased activism of the federal government during the war, an activism that found expression in finance, agriculture, taxation, building railroads, and, most importantly, in emancipation.


18. "War So Terrible": Why the Union Won and the Confederacy Lost at Home and Abroad
The Civil War and Reconstruction (HIST 119)

This lecture probes the reasons for confederate defeat and union victory. Professor Blight begins with an elucidation of the loss of will thesis, which suggests that it was a lack of conviction on the home front that assured confederate defeat, before offering another of other popular explanations for northern victory: industrial capacity, political leadership, military leadership, international diplomacy, a pre-existing political culture, and emancipation. Blight warns, however, that we cannot forget the battlefield, and, to this end, concludes his lecture with a discussion of the decisive Union victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg in July of 1863.


19. To Appomattox and Beyond: The End of the War and a Search for Meanings
The Civil War and Reconstruction (HIST 119)

Professor Blight uses Herman Melville's poem "On the Slain Collegians" to introduce the horrifying slaughter of 1864. The architect of the strategy that would eventually lead to Union victory, but at a staggering human cost, was Ulysses S. Grant, brought East to assume control of all Union armies in 1864. Professor Blight narrates the campaigns of 1864, including the Battles of the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, and Cold Harbor, and the siege of Petersburg. While Robert E. Lee battled Grant to a stalemate in Virginia, however, William Tecumseh Sherman's Union forces took Atlanta before beginning their March to the Sea, destroying Confederate morale and fighting power from the inside. Professor Blight closes his lecture with a description of the first Memorial Day, celebrated by African Americans in Charleston, SC 1865.


20. Wartime Reconstruction: Imagining the Aftermath and a Second American Republic
The Civil War and Reconstruction (HIST 119)

This lecture begins with a central, if often overlooked, turning point in the Civil War--the re-election of Abraham Lincoln in 1864. Although the concerted efforts of northern Peace Democrats and a palpable war weariness among the electorate made Lincoln's victory uncertain, timely Union victories in Atlanta and Mobile in September of 1864 secured Lincoln's re-election in November. This lecture concludes Professor Blight's section on the war, following Lee and Grant to Appomattox Courthouse, and describing the surrender of Confederate forces. The nature of Reconstruction and the future of the South, however, remained open questions in April of 1865.


21. Andrew Johnson and the Radicals: A Contest over the Meaning of Reconstruction
The Civil War and Reconstruction (HIST 119)

In this lecture, Professor Blight begins his engagement with Reconstruction. Reconstruction, Blight suggests, might best be understood as an extended referendum on the meaning of the Civil War. Even before the war's end, various constituencies in the North attempted to control the shape of the post-war Reconstruction of the South. In late 1863, President Abraham Lincoln offered his lenient "Ten Percent Plan." Six months later, Congressional Republicans concerned by Lincoln's charity rallied behind the more radical provisions of the Wade-Davis Bill. Despite their struggle for control over Reconstruction, Congressional Radicals and President Lincoln managed to work together on two vital pieces of Reconstruction legislation in the first months of 1865--the 13th Amendment, which outlawed slavery in the United States, and the Freedmen's Bureau bill.

Yale: The Civil War and Reconstruction (HIST 119)

22. Constitutional Crisis and Impeachment of a President
The Civil War and Reconstruction (HIST 119)

Professor Blight continues his discussion of the political history of Reconstruction. The central figure in the early phase of Reconstruction was President Andrew Johnson. Under Johnson's stewardship, southern whites held constitutional conventions throughout 1865, drafting new constitutions that outlawed slavery but changed little else. When the Republican-dominated U.S. Congress reassembled late in 1865, they put a stop to Johnson's leniency and inaugurated Radical (or Congressional) Reconstruction, a process that resulted in the immediate passage of the Civil Rights bill and the Fourteenth Amendment, and the eventual passage of four Reconstruction Acts. The Congressional elections in 1866 and Johnson's disastrous "Swing Around the Circle" speaking tour strengthened Radical control over Congress. Each step of the way, Johnson did everything he could to obstruct Congressional Reconstruction, setting the stage for his impeachment in 1868.


23. Black Reconstruction in the South: The Freedpeople and the Economics of Land and Labor
The Civil War and Reconstruction (HIST 119)

Professor Blight begins this lecture in Washington, where the passage of the first Reconstruction Act by Congressional Republicans radically altered the direction of Reconstruction. The Act invalidated the reconstituted Southern legislatures, establishing five military districts in the South and insisting upon black suffrage as a condition to readmission. The eventful year 1868 saw the impeachment of one president (Andrew Johnson) and the election of another (Ulysses S. Grant). Meanwhile, southern African Americans struggle to reap the promises of freedom in the face of economic disempowerment and a committed campaign of white supremacist violence.


24. Retreat from Reconstruction: The Grant Era and Paths to "Southern Redemption"
The Civil War and Reconstruction (HIST 119)

This lecture opens with a discussion of the myriad moments at which historians have declared an "end" to Reconstruction, before shifting to the myth and reality of "Carpetbag rule" in the Reconstruction South. Popularized by Lost Cause apologists and biased historians, this myth suggests that the southern governments of the Reconstruction era were dominated by unscrupulous and criminal Yankees who relied on the ignorant black vote to rob and despoil the innocent South. The reality, of course, diverges widely from this image. Among other accomplishments, the Radical state governments that came into existence after 1868 made important gains in African-American rights and public education. Professor Blight closes the lecture with the passage of the 15th Amendment, the waning radicalism of the Republican party after 1870, and the rise of white political terrorism across the South.


25. The "End" of Reconstruction: Disputed Election of 1876, and the "Compromise of 1877"
The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877 (HIST 119)

This lecture focuses on the role of white southern terrorist violence in brining about the end of Reconstruction. Professor Blight begins with an account the Colfax Massacre. Colfax, Louisiana was the sight of the largest mass murder in U.S. history, when a white mob killed dozens of African Americans in the April of 1873. Two Supreme Court decisions would do in the judicial realm what the Colfax Massacre had done in the political. On the same day as the Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court offered a narrow reading of the 14th Amendment in the Slaughterhouse cases, signaling a judicial retreat from the radicalism of the early Reconstruction years. The Cruikshank case, two years later, would overturn the convictions of the only three men sentenced for their involvement in Colfax, and marked another step away from reconstruction. Professor Blight concludes with the Panic of 1873 and the seemingly innumerable political scandals of the Grant Administration, suggesting the manner in which these events encouraged northerners to tire of the Reconstruction experiment by the early 1870s


26. Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory
The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877 (HIST 119)

Having dealt with the role of violence and the Supreme Court in bringing about the end of Reconstruction in his last lecture, Professor Blight now turns to the role of national electoral politics, focusing in particular on the off-year Congressional election of 1874 and the Presidential election of 1876. 1874 saw the return of the Democrats to majority status in the Senate and the House of Representatives, as voters sick of corruption and hurt by the Panic of 1873 fled the Republicans in droves. According to many historians, the contested election of 1876, and the "Compromise of 1877," which followed it, marked the official end of Reconstruction. After an election tainted by fraud and violence, Republicans and Democrats brokered a deal by which Republican Rutherford B. Hayes took the White House in exchange for restoration of "home rule" for the South.

27. Legacies of the Civil War
The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877 (HIST 119)

Professor Blight finishes his lecture series with a discussion of the legacies of the Civil War. Since the nineteenth century, Blight suggests, there have been three predominant strains of Civil War memory, which Blight defines as reconciliationist, white supremacist, and emancipationist. The war has retained a political currency throughout the years, and the ability to control the memory of the Civil War has been, and continues to be, hotly contested.