1、s just not as easy to find good heroes, and part of the reason may be that it comes after such a total, all out, and some may say, in so many ways a glorious war. Or as Kenneth Stampp, a great historian, once put it, until 1865 there was glory enough to go around, but after 1865 where was the glory?
2、 Its also been a period in which weve almost insisted-and I wonder just how you have learned about this before; if this were a smaller class I would ask you-but its as though our culture still insists, from this period of our history, that it be a melodrama, some kind of melodrama with, well, a suff
3、icient number of heroes and a sufficient number of villains, and a melodrama that usually ends up with a story of an oppressed South, much in need of our sympathy. Now, Ive put a piece of words up here in front of you. I walked back to see if you could read it. I do think most of you in the room can
4、 read it. Just hold onto the papers until the end, please. This is the Thirteenth Amendment. Were going to look at the Thirteenth and the Fourteenth today, or at least Ill get you up to the Fourteenth Amendment. If the Civil War and Reconstruction were a second founding-and Ill put the if on that, a
5、lthough for the next three weeks Im going to argue that-if it was a second founding, a second revolution of some kind, that second founding is in the Thirteenth, the Fourteenth, the Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution. Read the Thirteenth with me. Its the simplest, shortest-other than the actua
6、l parts of the Bill of Rights-its the simplest, shortest amendment in the U.S. Constitution. It outlaws slavery and involuntary servitude, except for imprisonment for crime. And then it has that very, very simple Section Two: Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislati
7、on. That is almost, in some ways, a prcis for what Reconstruction will become. What will constitute appropriate legislation to enforce black freedom? I put it up today in part, too, because just this weekend I was out lecturing in Springfield, Illinois at the new Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library
8、; and its a magnificent place if you havent been there. Its a museum full of lots of wax figures. Theres at least one life size wax of Lincoln in every bloody room, sometimes two of them, and then they use holograms and he appears all over the place. Its a little weird and scary. But at the end of t
9、he whole day and evening they took me down in the vault and asked me if I wanted to see some special documents and special possessions. They showed me one of Lincolns three existing top hats, they showed me the cast of his hand; I got to touch. They showed me personal notes he wrote to pardon desert
10、ers from the Union Army. They showed me all kinds of things. But one of the things they showed me was the original draft, the handwritten draft by the clerk of the House of Representatives, of the Thirteenth Amendment, and then signed by A. Lincoln and most of the members of the House, at least thos
11、e who chose to sign it. And I realized, damn, that thing is real. And maybe someday I can live to see the Fourteenth Amendment. Back to the Fourteenth in a moment. Sorry about that, thats not the Fourteenth Amendment, thats just the outline. Now, a few overall thoughts on Reconstruction, to just giv
12、e you some hooks to hang your hat on before we look back again at this question of Reconstruction during the war, and then after Lincolns death the fight that ensues, quickly, between the new president, Andrew Johnson, and the Congressional leadership that the Republican Party-soon now to be known a
13、s the Radical Republicans-and what will become a great constitutional crisis over who will control Reconstruction and what Reconstruction will be. Reconstruction, though, is often seen-it is indeed an era of almost gargantuan aspirations, if you think about what they were trying to achieve, and trag
14、ic failures. But its also an era of sudden and unprecedented legal, political, and constitutional change. Its also a period of tremendous social and political violence. Weve never experienced anything in America-other than sanctioned war, which the Civil War of course had been-weve never, ever exper
15、ienced social and political violence on the scale which youll see in Reconstruction. In fact theres a whole batch of books coming out now on Reconstruction violence, and I suspect this has a lot to do with living in the age of terrorism; publishers are really promoting the subject. Youre reading one
16、 of them thats just been out a year or two by Nicholas Lemann called Redemption. More on that in a week or two. In another way, Reconstruction was one long, ten, eleven year agonizing referendum on the meaning of the war. What had the war meant? Thats what Reconstruction was trying to explain, tryin
17、g to settle, trying to codify. What had actually been the verdict at Appomattox? When Lee surrendered and then Johnston surrendered and the Confederate Army surrendered, what was the verdict? Who got to determine it? Who had really won the war, and what had they won? What cause had lost? Now, someon
18、e really won this war and someone really lost this war. This is not one of those wars where you can say, You know, nobody ever wins a war. Nonsense. Union victory is real, Confederate defeat was virtually total, in a military sense. But what was the South to lose? One of the greatest challenges of R
19、econstruction was to determine how you take this massive, national blood feud, of unimaginable scale thats beginning, and then reconcile it into a new nation? The problem, in part, is that the survivors on both sides in this war would still have to inhabit the same land and the same country. It wasn
20、t as though an actual foreign country had been conquered and defeated. It was part of North America, it was part of the U.S.-or soon to be New U.S. of some kind. And the side that lost is going to have to in time inhabit the same government. How? Where do you go in precedent? Where do you in history
21、? Where do you go in the Constitution? Where do you look this up, to put Humpty Dumpty back together again?Put another way, the task was how to make the eventual logic of sectional reconciliation-knitting North and South back together-how to make the eventual logic of sectional reconciliation someho
22、w compatible with the logic of that revolution that was put in place in 1863-or in other words, Emancipation? And by logic, I mean you have to put North and South back together, but you also now have to deal with the fact the slaves have been freed to some new status. Got to do both. Put another way
23、, how do you square black freedom and all the stirrings of-the possibility at least-of racial equality now with that cause, in the South, that had lost everything-except its faith in white supremacy? How do you fold black freedom into white supremacy? How do you fold white supremacy into black freed
24、om? Can they ever be-could those ever be reconciled? And what if they cant? Lincoln spoke of a testing in the Gettysburg Address-if you remember the famous speech-testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived could long endure. The testing of the war in some ways would become easier than th
25、e testing the country would now face with Reconstruction. Or finally put yet another way-and I wrote about this at too much length in a book called Race and Reunion-the challenge of Reconstruction, and its the challenge weve had ever since, is how do you do two profound things at the same time? One
26、was healing and the other was justice. How do you have them both? What truly constitutes healing of a people, of a nation, thats suffered this scale of violence and destruction, and how do you have justice? And justice for whom?Heres what Lincoln said, next-to-the-last day of his life; no, three day
27、s before he was shot. It was his last public utterance, from a balcony at the White House. He was discussing Reconstruction. His audience that day wanted to just hear about the glories of the ending of the war, and he gave them a little mini lecture on Reconstruction because its precisely what he wa
28、s dealing with. He said this:Reconstruction is pressed much more closely upon our attention now. It is fraught with great difficulty. Unlike the case of a war between independent nations, there is no authorized organ for us to treat with. No one man has authority to give up the rebellion for any oth
29、er man. We simply must begin with, and mold from, disorganized and discordant elements, with all. So new and unprecedented is the whole case that no exclusive and inflexible plan can safely be prescribed as to detail, but important principles must be inflexible.s classic Lincoln. No one plan must we
30、 necessarily commit to, but we must stick to some principles.s Lincoln the pragmatist trying to figure it out. And then hes dead. But back to wartime, at least for a few minutes. The debate over Reconstruction, as it will play out through the next three years, four years, really five years, up to 18
31、70/71, is the debate that ensued between Lincoln and his own party leadership in Congress, as early as late 1863. Heres Lincolns plan again, and you can read all of this in Foners Short History of Reconstruction, but let me give it to you at least in brief terms. Youll remember I said the other day that Lincoln wanted Reconstruction to be presidential, lenient, and quick. He was openly friendly to Southerners
