Reconstruction In Arkansas Essay

She said she does not know in which episodes she will appear, "but seeing this documentary presented by Henry Louis Gates Jr., one of the foremost experts on African American history, is the thing to focus on. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way.”, his novel about the French Revolution in the late 18th century.

The 12 years that composed the post-war Reconstruction era (1865-77) witnessed a seismic shift in the meaning and makeup of the nation's democracy, with millions of former slaves and free black people seeking out their rightful place as equal citizens under the law.

The first two hours of the series will center on this pivotal decade following the rebellion, charting black progress and highlighting the accomplishments of the many political leaders who emerged to usher their communities into this new era of freedom.

To kill a Negro they do not deem murder.” Such men openly boasted to Thomas that blacks “will catch hell” when local whites re-acquired political control.

Trying to explain this defiance, Thomas pointed to prejudices seared into white minds and hearts during the era of slavery.

The series' second half will look beyond that hopeful decade, when the arc of history bent backwards, and it became increasingly clear that many former Confederates were never willingly going to accept this new social order and that the federal government was not prepared to provide African Americans with consistent or enduring protection of their new rights.

"I'm honored to be a part of this much-needed series about one of the most important and consequential chapters in American history," Maxwell said.Confederates who had held high civil or military offices during the war and those who had owned property worth ,000 or more in 1860 had to apply individually for a presidential pardon.When 10 percent of the voters in a state had taken the oath of loyalty, the state would be permitted to form a legal government and rejoin the Union. Sharkey, a Union Whig, as provisional governor to guide Reconstruction in the state and to organize an election of delegates for a state constitutional convention.Reconstruction for Mississippi’s black and white citizens was particularly intense.Places with the shortest, perhaps most mild, Reconstruction experience were the Upper South states of Tennessee, North Carolina, and Virginia, where former slaves were a minority of the population, and white citizens had refused to join the Confederacy until after the war’s first military engagement at Fort Sumter. Colonists who remained loyal to England during the American Revolution C.A group of legislators appointed by the king to represent the colonies in Parliament D.As Thomas put it, though white Mississippians “admit that the individual relations of masters and slaves have been destroyed by the war and the President's emancipation proclamation, they still have an ingrained feeling that the blacks at large belong to the whites at large.” In 1865 this deep prejudice appeared in Mississippi’s notorious Black Codes enacted in late November by the newly elected Mississippi Legislature.One of the first necessities of Reconstruction was to define the legal status of former slaves. Which civil rights would the state legislators give to freedmen?Colonel Samuel Thomas, the assistant commissioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau who opened the Bureau office in Vicksburg, noticed white Mississippians’ defiant posture when he traveled through the state months after the war.“Wherever I go—the street, the shop, the house, or the steamboat—I hear the people talk in such a way as to indicate that they are yet unable to conceive of the Negro as possessing any rights at all.” Thomas worried that whites “who are honorable in their dealings with their white neighbors will cheat a Negro without feeling a single twinge of their honor.