I was watching a lecture by historian David Blight in which he says one of the key challenges of Reconstruction after emancipation and Confederate defeat was how to knit North and South together while recognizing black freedom. Blight discusses this at the 9 through 11 minute marks. Blight asks:
“How do you square black freedom and the stirrings of racial equality 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?”
So I want to ask whether Black freedom and white supremacy were fundamentally incompatible, or whether they could have been reconciled. If they could not have been reconciled, what could have led to a better result to Reconstruction than the actual outcome?
Here’s the video. Watch the 9 to 11 minute segment.
Blight asks “How do you do two profound things at the same time? How do you have healing and justice?”
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Thank you for the post; it was an interesting lecture. Your question is doubly difficult in that “justice” and “healing” are awfully slippery terms, including that if they are at all meaningful, it depends on the context in which they are used. It would be different in the 1860s than in the 1960s than in 2019.
That said, you can put me among those who opine that the Civil War hasn’t really ended, though it’s reasonable to hope that it will, eventually, fade away.