![]() There is no chance or hope of healthy politics until we do get rid of it. Or the Springfield Republican, a Republican Party paper, an old abolitionist paper, 1876: “We must get rid of the Southern question. Not until now have the echoes of the war died out of our politics and our lives.” Just listen to how conclusive that is - it’s over folks. Not until now have the questions which grew out of slavery been fully and finally settled. Slavery died in this country ten years ago, but not until now have we finished the work of readjusting our national life to the new order of things. The New York Evening Post announced: “The great work of the century,” it said, “is finished, and the year which is about to dawn will be the very first one wholly free from the duty of dealing with the old and dangerous subject. But listen to just a couple of the public commentaries, that year, of America’s centennial of independence and what they were thinking about. But I’m going to leave that question of when Reconstruction ended to all the great forthcoming books of my various graduate students who are going to solve that issue, and I’m going to probably suggest before we finish that it’s never quite ended. It’ll end in a disputed - the first - not the first, really the second - great disputed election in American history, and a sordid political compromise that most of us in textbooks and in teaching still call the end of Reconstruction. Now that year will bring, as we’ll see in a moment, a pivotal election, to say the least. They were about to have the magnificent centennial of their independence. ![]() ![]() Structure ways to forget it.Īmericans weren’t forgetting by 1876, at least in a host of ways. “Only thank God men have done learned how to forget quick what they ain’t brave enough to cure.” Can’t solve that problem, weighed down too heavily by that problem, don’t have the solutions for all the world’s ills, it’s an ancient problem, it’s a natural problem, forget it, try to forget it. He has his character say, “Only thank God men have done learned how to forget quick what they ain’t brave enough to try to cure.” I’ll do it once more. It’s one of the best single sentence descriptive explanations of what happened to the legacy and memory of all these events I’ve ever read. It comes from the deep, dark heart, as only Faulkner really wrote it, of the burden of the past, of memory of slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction on the South, but he’s really referring to all of us, he’s referring to humanity. There’s lots of Snopes’ in Faulkner’s novels, especially that novel. Professor David Blight: In his little novel The Hamlet, William Faulkner has a line he puts in the mouth of one of his characters. Introduction: Exhibitions and Elections of 1876 The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877 HIST 119 - Lecture 26 - Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American MemoryĬhapter 1.
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