"The events of 1866, for all that there were no armies on the field, were as much a revolution as the half decade before....The Civil War was the bloodiest war in American history, but it was the crucible for a new America. For once you have given a man a rifle and told him to fight, told him he can fight, he will not accept a return to servitude, by whatever words the condition is described."
-W. E. B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction
"We have had our 1776; now we shall have our 1787."
-Frederick Douglass
"As an exhausted nation surveyed its fields of triumph and despair, Lincoln felt likewise and did likewise. The work was, after all, half done; the nation was still half torn asunder, bleeding. And Lincoln knew, or would know shortly, that the bleeding was not yet over."
-Erin Fodor, introduction, America's Second Revolution
-W. E. B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction
"We have had our 1776; now we shall have our 1787."
-Frederick Douglass
"As an exhausted nation surveyed its fields of triumph and despair, Lincoln felt likewise and did likewise. The work was, after all, half done; the nation was still half torn asunder, bleeding. And Lincoln knew, or would know shortly, that the bleeding was not yet over."
-Erin Fodor, introduction, America's Second Revolution
-Erin Fodor, America's Second RevolutionAmerica in 1865 was a nation of contrasts--the industrializing coasts and the agrarian plains and west, and half of that still 'Indian Country'; a nation of white and black with their relations far from settled; a nation of north and south which, Appomatox or not, was still bitterly divided; and a Congress only marginally less fractious. The Union Party, never really a party in its own right, was spintering back into Republicans and The Democracy, and each of those had their wings. The Radicals had been steadily gaining ground, and the Wade-Davis Bill, vetoed once, would surely return soon under another name.
Even the Presidency shared the division, with Andrew Johnson, War Democrat, as Vice President. It is one of history's great mysteries what he might have done as president, for it was nearly he who succeeded Lincoln on April 7, 1865. He, unlike Lincoln, had a personal detestation of the southern aristocracy; and likewise the poor whites of the south might have not been so hostile to Reconstruction had it come from 'one of their own' rather than an Ohioan.
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