I Have a Few Questions

[Bill Richter]

Kate, for your first question, read my intro to Historical Dictionary of the Old South. For what it is worth many prominent abolitionists did not support Reconstruction after the Civil War. Historian C. Vann Woodward once theorized that Reconstruction was designed by the North to make the South friendly to free black settlement and thus keep them out of the North, fearing freed blacks would flood north after 1865, as did escaped slaves before the war, looking for real freedom unless it were forced on the white South.

On your second question, many wanted to send the blacks back to Africa. The Am Colonization Society sent freed slaves to Liberia the capital of which remains to this day as Monrovia. Others wanted to sent freed blacks to Isle la Vache off Haiti, others to Panama (the place was named Lincolnonia by a cynical press), or to Far West Texas (there was another plan to give east Tex to Blacks, west Tex to Loyal Union whites and north Tex to the Rebs), or perhaps to Southern Fla. All these ideas failed because few blacks wanted to be sent away from their homes. Ben Butler allegedly said that if every ship owned in the US were used to send blacks to Africa or somewhere, the lines would keep coming because of the birth rate. Fred Douglass argued that blacks had earned the right to stay through their slave labor and by fighting for the N in the Civil War (about 200,000 did). In the end Douglass won the argument. The North wanted the white South to grant blacks equal rights and opportunity, not the North. Back to Woodward's thesis on what Reconstruction was to achieve--contrary to what most of us learned in school.