Now that the National Park Service is in the fourth year of its work on the Reconstruction Era National Historical Park in Beaufort, SC, it can be hard to imagine that when this was first proposed there was serious opposition to it. I guess it should not be too hard to imagine since for the first 140 years after Reconstruction there was no such thing as a Reconstruction National Park.
In 2015 the New York Times had an interesting article on the difficulties of bringing this task to fruition. You can read it here.
According to the Times:
“It’s the biggest gap in the park service by far,” said Robert Sutton, the service’s chief historian, adding that too many Americans still regard Reconstruction as “a disaster” best left forgotten.
The article continues:
Historians have traditionally defined Reconstruction as lasting from 1865 until 1877, when most federal troops had withdrawn from the South and white supremacist Democrats gained control of state governments. The park service, echoing scholarly recalibrations, is taking a broader view, looking at sites dating from 1861, when slaves began fleeing to Union encampments, until 1898, when Jim Crow laws were fully in place.
The high-water years of Reconstruction included passage of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments, which granted equal citizenship and voting rights to 4 million formerly enslaved African-Americans, as well as the creation, for both blacks and whites, of the first statewide public school systems in the South, the first significant public hospitals, new labor policies and other transformations.
“It was an amazing period in the history of American democracy,” said Kate Masur, a professor at Northwestern University who is one of the authors of the report for the park service. “It’s when you really see these ideas about equality and human rights that America had put on the table being understood in a new way.”
…“There may not be any field of history where the gap between what historians know and what people believe is as vast,” said Gregory P. Downs, Ms. Masur’s co-author, who recently moved from the City University of New York to University of California, Davis.
But not everyone is happy that the history of Reconstruction will be brought to the public. In fact, this is not the first time there has been an attempt to create a Reconstruction park. According to the article:
A bill allocating preliminary financing passed the United States Senate in 2003 but died in the House after opposition by the Sons of Confederate Veterans, who denounced Reconstruction as a period that “victimized many South Carolinians.”
The memory of that fight is fresh on both sides. “If the park service is talking about opening a site to celebrate Reconstruction, we’re going to have a hard time with that,” said Jeff Antley, a Sons of Confederate Veterans member from Charleston who helped organize the group’s Civil War 150th commemorations, including a controversial “secession ball.”
“What was done to the South was horrible,” he said.
Mr. Allen, who brokered a conversation between the Sons and the N.A.A.C.P. during the dispute over the secession ball, said that the removal of the Confederate battle flag from the state capitol had created “a new climate.”
But Representative James E. Clyburn, a Democrat who represents part of Beaufort County in Congress, said a park service site, while “long overdue,” could meet “some resistance, maybe some significant resistance.”
“I don’t think it’s been poorly understood,” Mr. Clyburn, a former high school history teacher, said of Reconstruction. “I think it’s been intentionally misrepresented.”
Some institutions in South Carolina are already working to change the picture. The Woodrow Wilson Family Home in Columbia, which reopened last year as a “museum of Reconstruction,” uses Wilson, who lived in the house between 1871 and 1874, to highlight the period’s positive achievements and the “political terrorism,” as the exhibition puts it, that helped roll them back.
“It’s not like we hit people over the head and tell them, ‘Everything you’ve heard about Reconstruction is wrong,’ ” said Fielding Freed, director of house museums for Historic Columbia. “But as people move through, you can see them thinking.”
A 2003 article (no no longer on the net) from the Low Country Newspapers offers a voice of opposition.
If the National Park Service wants to honor blacks being free from slavery and blacks getting the right to vote, that’s fine,” said Michael Givens, first lieutenant of the state division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. “Just don’t do it under the pretenses of Reconstruction….
From the same article:
Givens of the Sons of Confederate Veterans said Reconstruction was a terrible time for Southern whites, who he said were “punished” by Northern whites, or “carpetbaggers,” who came South. “The genesis of bad relationships between the races is Reconstruction,” rather than slavery, Givens said.
Always revealing to hear the Sons of Confederate Veterans discuss “race relations.”
The NY Tomes article concludes:
Still, the period is a powerful negative charge for many white Southerners, including some who find inspiration in the tale of African-Americans moving to freedom.
Leading a reporter around the mostly unexcavated Mitchelville site, Randy Dolyniuk, president of the Mitchelville Preservation Project, called the town “an incredible American story that hasn’t been told,” but noted, “I personally don’t like Reconstruction.”
“In some cases, the Southern white was persecuted,” Mr. Dolyniuk said. “I’m not a historian, but I think we could’ve done it better.”
Mr. Downs, the historian, said that such sentiments underscored both the importance, and the difficulty, of presenting a better public story.
“It took a lot of time and effort to establish the myths of Reconstruction,” he said. “It’s going to take a lot of time and effort to tear down those myths.”
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No surprise at the opposition. Confederate heritage groups are notoriously bad at history in addition to being notoriously racist.
Just discovered your site, Pat, Looking forward to being a frequent visitor.
Hi Matt, I am glad to see you. I only set up the site Tuesday. Hopefully you will stop by. You know how much I respect your opinion.
Pat