The Reconstruction Era & its Aftermath

Kelly  0:00  
This is Unsung History, the podcast where we discuss people and events in American history that haven't always received a lot of attention. I'm your host, Kelly Therese Pollock. I'll start each episode with a brief introduction to the topic, and then talk to someone who knows a lot more than I do. Be sure to subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app, so you never miss an episode. And please tell your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, maybe even strangers to listen too.

In 1860, the deep political divisions in the United States were reflected in the electoral map. Republican Abraham Lincoln of Illinois, won both the popular vote and the electoral vote, but he received no votes in 10 southern states where he didn't even appear on the ballot. Nine of those 10 states voted for incumbent vice president John C. Breckinridge from Kentucky, who ran on the Southern Democratic ticket and later became Confederate Secretary of War. Between the election and Lincoln's inauguration, seven southern states seceded from the Union, and a few weeks before Lincoln took his oath of office, Jefferson Davis began his term as provisional President of the Confederate States of America. Lincoln's running mate in 1860, was ardent abolitionist Republican Hannibal Hamlin from Maine. Like many vice presidents of the time, Hamlin was not closely involved in the administration. He didn't attend cabinet meetings, and rarely visited the White House. In fact, he spent much of his term in Maine, and even enlisted as a private in the Maine State Coast Guard during the Civil War. Although Lincoln personally opposed slavery, his thinking on abolition evolved slowly to the frustration of Radical Republicans. Hamlin was one of the people pushing Lincoln to issue an emancipation proclamation, and to allow the enlistment of Black troops in the Union army. When Lincoln finally felt that he could issue an emancipation proclamation without dividing the North, he invited Hamlin to dinner to look at the draft and offer suggestions. In the 1864 election, however, Lincoln was worried about his reelection chances, facing challenges from both radical Republicans and the peace plank of the Democrats. His solution was to drop Hamlin from the ticket in favor of Andrew Johnson, a pro union Democrat from Tennessee, calling their party the National Union Party. Johnson had grown up in poverty as Lincoln had, but upon becoming a prosperous tailor, he had purchased land and slaves, eventually enslaving 10 people. Johnson served in Congress and then as governor of Tennessee. When Tennessee seceded in 1861, he was a senator, the only senator from a Confederate state who did not resign, serving out the remainder of his term, which ended in March, 1862. At that point, Lincoln appointed him the military governor of Tennessee, since the union had recaptured most of the state by that point. Lincoln's VP decision may have been prudent politically, but the practical consequences were devastating. On March 4, 1865, Hamlin gave his farewell remarks to the Senate, and then yielded to the new vice president, a very drunk Andrew Johnson. Although no verbatim transcript of the full speech exists, a Cincinnati newspaper described it as, "the idiotic babble of a mind besotted by a fortnight's debauch." A month later, the Civil War ended with Robert E. Lee's surrender on April 9. Two days after that, Lincoln gave his final public address, previewing his thoughts on reconstruction, and advocating for reconciliation and at least limited Black suffrage. Actor John Wilkes Booth, who was in the gathered crowd watching the speech at the White House, vowed, "That is the last speech he will ever make." Booth shot and killed Lincoln three days later, making Democrat Andrew Johnson, the new president. In an interview a month later, Johnson declared, "There is no such thing as reconstruction. These states have not gone out of the Union. Therefore reconstruction is unnecessary." By the time Congress came back into session in December, most of the Confederate States had been "reconstructed" according to Johnson's plan, which required only that they abolished slavery in accordance with the 13th Amendment, swear loyalty to the Union, and pay off their war debt. With such lenient policies, many southern states enacted laws called Black Codes that severely restricted the activity of the freed Black people. Johnson also issued more than 13,000 pardons to former Confederates, including Jefferson Davis. Radical Republicans in Congress were appalled by Johnson's actions, setting up a power struggle, as Congress repeatedly passed progressive legislation, including the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which Johnson vetoed. Congress overrode his veto, the first time in history that the US Congress ever overrode a presidential veto on a major piece of legislation, but only one of 15 times that Congress overrode a Johnson veto in the less than four years he was president. Congress then passed the monumental 14th Amendment, which said, among other things, "No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States. Nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty or property without due process of law, nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction, the equal protection of laws." Except for Tennessee, the former Confederate states refused to ratify, leaving Congress to pass the Reconstruction Act of 1867, which divided the south into military districts, and required southern states to ratify the 14th Amendment and write new state constitutions that were approved by a majority of voters in the state, including African Americans, before they could receive full recognition in Congress. Johnson, not surprisingly, vetoed the act, which Congress once again overrode. In March, 1868, the US House impeached Johnson, after he attempted to fire the Secretary of War. Johnson was acquitted by one vote in the Senate, but by that point, it was clear that neither party wanted him as their nominee. Ulysses S. Grant, the commanding general of the Union Army, succeeded him. Grant approached reconstruction with better intentions than his predecessor, and he had some success in championing the 15th Amendment, which granted voting rights to all Black men, and in establishing the Department of Justice in 1870, to investigate violence against African Americans. By 1870, all of the former Confederate states had been readmitted to the union, having written progressive state constitutions as mandated by the Reconstruction Act of 1867. An estimated 2000 Black Americans held office at all levels of government during reconstruction, including Hiram R. Revels and Blanche K. Bruce in the US Senate, and 15 US representatives, including Robert Smalls, who had escaped enslavement during the Civil War. In 1871, Congress, at Grant's request, passed the Third Enforcement Act, also known as the Ku Klux Klan Act, which empowered the president to deploy federal troops to deal with the violence of the Klan. Grant's presidency, though, especially in his second term, was overshadowed by charges of corruption, and the financial panic of 1873 turned public opinion against the Republican Party, limiting Grant's ability to focus on or enforce reconstruction. In 1876, Grant, who likely would have lost anyway, chose not to run for a third term in the fiercely contested and sometimes violent 1876 presidential election. Congress eventually appointed a committee to decide the election, with the lone Independent voter on the commission, siding with the Republicans to select Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, possibly after a secret negotiation for Democratic support in exchange for Hayes agreeing to remove federal troops from the south. Whether or not such a secret agreement was made, Hayes did withdraw the troops, formally ending the Reconstruction Era and removing support for Black civil rights and Black safety. Any gains Black people had made in the south during Reconstruction were quickly erased by the establishment of Jim Crow Laws, legalizing racial segregation and Black disenfranchisement, enforced by a terror campaign of white supremacist violence. Joining me now to help us understand reconstruction and its aftermath is Dr. Manisha Sinha, the James L. and Shirley A. Draper chair in American History at the University of Connecticut, and the author of, "The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction 1860 to 1920." 

Hello, Manisha, thanks so much for joining me today.

Dr. Manisha Sinha  12:06  
Thank you so much for having me, Kelly. 

Kelly  12:09  
So I would love to hear a little bit about why you wrote this particular book. You've written previous books on slavery and antebellum South Carolina. Why this book?

Dr. Manisha Sinha  12:21  
Yes. So this book really grew out of my second book on abolition, on the history of the abolition movement, "The Slave's Cause." I was really interested in looking at what happened to the abolitionist project after the Civil War on emancipation, because the conventional wisdom was that they were just flailing around, and they had no program or plan for emancipation. And initially, I conceived of this as a dual biography of two prominent radical Republicans who had roots in the abolition movement, Thaddeus Stevens and Charles Sumner, but when I submitted the book proposal for that, or rather, my agent submitted it, my editor, my current editor for this book, saw something in it. He said, he thought that this would be a new history of reconstruction, a new way of talking about this time period. And so it was really his idea, not mine, to write that bigger book on reconstruction. And as I began writing it, I realized that all the questions that my students had asked me about reconstruction kept coming back to me. They were really more interested in, you know, why did this experiment fail? And how exactly did it fail? And why did it take so long to to sort of achieve what reconstruction had done in a few short years? So I ended up writing a big book on reconstruction. I hadn't planned on doing that, but but I see it as really stemming from my interests in the politics of slavery, and then the abolition movement to really look at emancipation and its aftermath.

Kelly  14:01  
And you've mentioned, this is a big book, it's it is a big book, both, you know, fairly long, but also big, the timeframe that you're looking at. And so you start before the Civil War even, with the election of Lincoln, go all the way through 1920, and the 19th Amendment. Could you talk a little bit about why you chose to frame it that way, and how you see this entire period as reconstruction or a piece of reconstruction? 

Dr. Manisha Sinha  14:27  
Yes. So it is big in terms of chronology. Right. And it's not as big as my abolition book, but but big enough. And the reason I decided to have a sort of broader chronology going back to 1860, and going, looking forward right up to 1920, is because I think to really understand the issues of reconstruction, one has to go back to the Civil War itself, and what happened during the war. I see Lincoln and his election in 1860, as really inaugurating a new period in American history, and that's where I get the title from, "The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic." I see it as inaugurating the second American republic.I see Lincoln as a reconstruction president for that reason. And I really pay a lot of attention to what I call wartime reconstruction, what was achieved under his presidency, because the myth is that, "Oh, you know, Lincoln just died. And he had no plan for reconstruction. And, you know, we can't really see him as someone who would put forward the reconstruction." And some of the Lost Cause mythologists had this strange idea that he would be more lenient on the south, which of course, his successor, Andrew Johnson was extremely lenient and wanted to restore the status quo antebellum. And because I'm looking at the fall of the second American republic too, I don't just end at the conventional ending point for reconstruction, which is 1877, when the last reconstruction governments fall in the south. I was really interested in looking at how the process of formal disfranchisement gets put into place only in the 1890s, and how you have this new regime of Jim Crow, of racial segregation again, put into place only in the 1890s, and how that feeds into the rise of American imperialism, and this notion that somehow non white peoples are basically incapable of governing themselves. And when I started looking at that latter half of the 19th century, all these other issues came up, you know, the issue of the conquest of the west and the way Indigenous sovereignty was treated, the issue of you know, the reconstruction of the North itself, with the rise of industrial capitalism on the take off of industrial capitalism that we normally associate with the Gilded Age. And basically, I'm arguing in the book that all these events are connected to the fall, and the long unwinding of reconstruction. And then I wanted to end the book in a high note, and I end with the women's suffrage amendment. But it's not just that. I noticed that the 19th Amendment, the wording is very similar to the 15th amendment that gave Black men the right to vote, and also the issue of suffrage as women's suffrage as an important issue, in terms of expanding the boundaries of American democracy arises during reconstruction. So it's very much also a part of the story of reconstruction. And I was very insistent on looking at reconstruction history as also women's history, which again, had not been done conventionally. So these are the reasons why it goes from 1860 to 1920. And there were sort of substantive reasons why it did that. 

Kelly  17:54  
So I want to talk a little bit about the promise of reconstruction, what what reconstruction briefly was, could have been the second American republic, as you call it. So let's talk a little bit about that, you know, what, what was the goal of the reconstruction in the way that Lincoln originally sort of was thinking about it before he was killed, the way that Andrew Johnson, as we'll talk about did not live up to, you know, and what, what could have been if reconstruction had been successful?

Dr. Manisha Sinha  18:29  
That's a great question, because I argue that reconstruction really does represent a massive course correction in US history, because here is a moment when you have an institution like racial slavery, which is really entrenched and expanding in the American Republic, the first one, that is done away with, right during the Civil War. And also the idea that you can have citizenship for people, regardless of race, or previous condition of servitude. These were very important ideas, in terms of really reimagining American democracy. And I see them as coming up during the war itself, when enslaved people immediately vote with their feet, as they had done before the war, and make the Union lines and you know, whether the Lincoln administration was saying this, or the Union Army or Congress, they made this into a war about slavery. And soon, the, you know, the rest of the country followed, including the federal government. And it made sense, of course, because the Republican Party at that time was the party of anti slavery and relative racial liberalism compared to the Democratic Party. So I really wanted to show that even during the war itself, where you do have experiments in land redistribution even, really radical ideas are coming up, mainly amongst freed people and the abolitionist allies, but sometimes even being implemented by the Union army. And before Lincoln dies, we have two important initial steps in the foundation of the second American republic. One is the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution that unleashes progressive constitutionalism during the Civil War that abolishes slavery. Now, there is a criminal exception, but it's not as the framers intended that us put to bad use in the south in order to undermine emancipation later on. And the second is the formation of the Freedmen's Bureau. So this is the first time that you have a federal government agency, overseeing the transition from slavery to freedom, and also rendering assistance not just to freed people, but also to southern white refugees, you know, people forget that. But this idea that the government is responsible for the welfare of its citizens, and you have this government agency, it's what we would associate today with modern liberalism, or social democracy, with the government intervening to protect the rights of the most vulnerable, right. So these are important principles that are established by Lincoln. Of course, you have Andrew Johnson, who is often seen as a reconstruction president, his plans are called presidential reconstruction. And I'm like, "No, he had no plan for reconstruction. He wanted to go back to the antebellum status quo," and I call him a restorationist, which is what Thaddeus Stevens called him, that his policies lay outside the process of reconstruction. But the achievements of reconstruction that you hinted at, was, in fact, the remaking of the US Constitution, even more than the 13th Amendment is the 14th Amendment, which, as you know, has been very much part of our conversation today, because so many of our modern rights stemmed from its equal protection clause. We have extended that and the people who wrote those amendments, you know, wrote that constitutional amendment, people like Bingham and others, you could read the Congressional Globe, which is a record of all the proceedings in Congress at that time, they're saying, "You know, we want to make a broad egalitarian statement. We can't visualize what rights will be protected under this clause. So let's use the broadest language possible." And he's the one who came up with the notion also Bill of Rights to call the first eight amendments to the US Constitution. He said, "Let's nationalize them." So the idea of national birthright citizenship, which many conservatives today find objectionable, comes from the 14th amendment. Some of our modern rights come from, of course, one of them right to privacy has recently been overturned. But the idea was to establish this kind of broad language. Many of the issues that we deal with today, in terms of the debt ceiling, for instance, it's actually unconstitutional according to the 14th amendment to hold the country hostage, because the debt the national debt should be respected, according to one of his clauses. The disqualification for attempting an insurrection against the United States government, after having sworn an oath of office, federal office to uphold the US Constitution, that disqualification can be done away with only by an act of Congress, and that also two thirds of the Congress. So it's a it's an ironclad disqualification, that actually visualized maybe even future threats to the American republic. So the 14th Amendment in particular, I think, is a huge achievement. And this tragedy, of course, is that it was never implemented properly. And there's also a clause that says that if you disenfranchise male citizens, it introduced unfortunately the word male into the US Constitution, you'd suffer loss of representation in Congress. Now, the southern states never, you know, suffered that loss throughout the Jim Crow period, throughout the period where they blatantly disenfranchise Black men, either through legal and political mechanisms or through sheer domestic terrorism. And so I think that's really a sleeping giant in our Constitution. And that if he just implemented it, you know, people keep saying, "Let's do away with this constitution, or let's amend it." As it is, let's just implement what's there, we'd be fine. Of course, you have the first federal civil rights laws that were passed during Reconstruction, the Civil Rights Law of 1866, under which cases are still fought today in federal courts, also the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which our very reactionary Supreme Court declared unconstitutional, but which would have prevented the rise of Jim Crow and racial segregation. This was a Charles Sumners' idea, preventing any racial discrimination in any public space. So if you think about it, those are amazing achievements of reconstruction. There's a lot of criticism of reconstruction that it was not radical enough, but just political and civil rights, there was no, you know, redistribution of land, etc. But, you know, coming from a third world country, I can tell you that owning a marginal piece of land is not particularly politically empowering in our modern world, that what we need to have access to economic resources, but also the political power and civil rights to actually have that kind of access. So who knows, if reconstruction had been successful, we would have had a very different country, we would not have what is commonly known as the nadir in American democracy, which is a period of you know convict lease system, of, you know, racial terror, lynchings, and this, this kind of what I call thermidor, this kind of reaction spread all through the country. So there's nativism there, the Chinese Exclusion acts, and there's a violent suppression of labor unions and strikes. You know, instead of implementing rights in the South, the repressive bars of the government are used to put down very violently, certain spectacular strikes that take place at this time. So, so we achieved a lot during reconstruction. The tragedy of reconstruction is not that it didn't go far enough, as many historians argue, but in fact that it was overthrown because who knows how far it would have gone, if we had safeguarded those achievements?

Kelly  26:46  
I want to come back to Andrew Johnson. I was flipping through the book right before we talked and I had written in the margin at one point, "Andrew Johnson was the worst!" Like, I knew that going into the book, but this really solidified it for me. So can you talk some, you said he was a restorationist, not a reconstructionist, what sorts of things he did to really undermine the whole project of reconstruction?

Dr. Manisha Sinha  27:12  
Another great question, and you're right, you know. Andrew Johnson always ranks at the bottom, when it comes to historians ranking US presidents. And I had the pleasure of putting him close to the bottom recently, too. So I was quite happy to do that. You know, it's one of those peculiar things in US history where the best presidents are succeeded by some of the worst. And so you have Lincoln, and then you have Johnson. And I think the biggest mistake that the Republican Party did was to replace Hannibal Hamlin, who was also a Democrat from Maine, but who was anti slavery, with Johnson from Tennessee who actually had opposed emancipation, even though he stayed with the union when his state seceded, he actually had opposed emancipation. So that's how bad he was. He's always seen as a poor white, but in fact, he had owned enslaved people. And he definitely, as one can see during reconstruction, his policies were very much sympathetic to ex confederates, and the slaveholding elite that he allegedly detested, did not. And the reason why I really did want to clear that, that sort of air about Johnson was because there have been some recent books that have tried to rehabilitate him, saying, "Well, you know, he really also kept federal troops in the in the South. Well, he was not that bad." In fact, radicals initially thought he would be better than Lincoln, all of which I find very questionable. You can see this particularly with Thaddeus Stevens, from whom I get the idea that Johnson's regime was a restoration, rather than reconstruction. They are very skeptical of him. Actually, there are very few abolitionists who see Johnson as some kind of savior. And Johnson says to Black people, "I'm going to be your Moses," something that Lincoln had never claimed even. You know, so he's very bombastic in in making those claims for himself. So there have been recent books that have tried to absolve Johnson, and even said that many of the contemporary records of his acute racism was written later and was not contemporary. So I want to set the record straight without getting into sort of histori-graphical wars with other historians. But I just wanted to make sure that people understood what a tragedy it was that Lincoln was assassinated in every sense of the way. And I quote an enslaved person saying that. I also found that actually a political scientist at Harvard found this and he said this to me and I was really impressed that right in 1865, before even radicals and abolitionists are thinking of impeaching Johnson, an enslaved group from Savannah, Georgia sends a petition saying, "We must impeach Johnson," because what he is doing in terms of green lighting, a Klan terror in the south and putting back into place, these, you know, people who had absolutely no regrets about ultimately supporting the Confederacy, even though they were quote, unionists, like Johnson, meaning conditional unionists, many of them, unlike Johnson, in fact, most of the men for their states, so you know, and then you had the Black Codes in the south, which were a kind of a reprise of the slave codes, without being called  slave codes, so putting Black people to as close a stage to slavery as possible. All this happens under Johnson and he greenlights it, and he thinks he can get away with making outrageous claims that, you know, the radicals and the abolitionists are the true traitors to the United States, and not people who actually took up arms against the United States. So he does a lot of really bad things. And I really feel that if it was Hamlin, or if Lincoln had lived, then maybe reconstruction could have been implemented without that massive opposition in the south. Because what Johnson does is he gives fresh wind to all these former Confederates in their sails, saying it's okay to be obdurate, and to refuse to accept the results of the war and to continue to oppose Black citizenship. So I think  him just even though he's there, not for very long he is voted out, of course, in 1868. No one wants him neither the Democratic Party nor the Republican Party. And Ulysses Grant is elected president and reconstruction proceeds unchecked. But I think he does play a role in really fanning southern resistance and opposition to reconstruction. And in that sense, he kind of ultimately wins. Because in the 1870s, he is reelected to Congress from Tennessee. And all those same guys are back in power. Congress passed an amnesty law, which pardons all ex Confederates in one fell swoop. And, you know, Democratic Party takes back the US House of Representatives in 1874. And then you have the quick fall of reconstruction. So, you know, he he really is a bad actor in the sense that his obduracy you know, he is the president who, I think vetoes the most number of bills.  There hadn't been that many vetoes until he was, then his veto is also overturned by two thirds of Congress each time, but but he just fans that southern resistance, you know, they do not accept the results of the war, and they decide to fight tooth and nail, and that I think there's a tragedy of American history that he was ever that close to the presidency, or that he became president and, and did that.

Kelly  33:21  
Yeah, and as you've just alluded to, reconstruction, of course, doesn't just fail, it is violently overthrown. Could you talk some about the violence even I think a lot of us probably know something about the KKK or something. But just reading the sheer terror of what that moment must have been like is, it's not at all surprising, of course, that Black people who could leave the south did leave the south that, that they just decided it wasn't worth trying to go and vote, you know. Could you talk some about that, what what that moment was like, and how it was not then put down by the federal government as should have been? 

Dr. Manisha Sinha  34:05  
Yes, I mean, I am a historian of the Civil War and Reconstruction. So I'm familiar with the violence and for the familiar with the sources that document that violence. And even for me, when I was writing the book, the sheer scale and barbarism of that violence was eye opening. And now there are several good books on just this issue. And earlier on, there were good books too, by Allen Trelease and George Rable, all that I have read, but just wading through the document of blood literally was, you know, it's like when you read about the Holocaust or something and you wonder how depraved can people be that you would perpetrate that kind of violence because I didn't mince my words, I reproduce some of the horrific things that many of these racist terror groups did in this south, and many of them were of course, claiming to be part of, you know, the chivalry of the south and invoking southern honor and heritage. And I thought of Robert Elliott, who was a Black congressman from South Carolina saying, "Pray, who's the barbarian here?" in just looking at these instances of violence. So what happens, of course, during reconstruction is that this kind of low intensity guerrilla warfare against Black people, but also white Republicans, and political opponents, northern teachers, missionaries, you know, federal government agents, Union Army soldiers, it just continues throughout reconstruction, with the founding, of course of the Ku Klux Klan in 1866. So that's right away. But under Grant, under the enforcement acts, which was recently evoked again, during January 6, the federal government could actually use those mechanisms to cut down insurrection. And one of them was actually called the Ku Klux Klan Act, because it was specifically targeting the Ku Klux Klan. It's not a lot of these people, not all of them are prosecuted. And there were so many cases in the south, you know, the Department of Justice is formed for the first time, you have an attorney general, you know, who is prosecuting these things, agents of the federal government, district attorneys and others in the south, trying to just establish the rule of law in the south, basically. And what one sees is that if the federal government had the, the will and the intention to do this, they could do it. And they do manage to stamp out clan activity, even though they don't manage to prosecute everyone and people get away. And there are 1000s of cases and some are prosecuted, and some are not. But you could stamp out the Klan as an organized terror group in certain areas in the south like upcountry, South Carolina. And so you you see that achievement, but then by Grant's second term, you know, the Klan has gone, the first Klan has gone the second Klan comes much later, the early 20th century. You have the rise of all these other terror groups, you know, the White League in Louisiana, the Red Shirts in South Carolina, you know, but like the Brown Shirts and the Black Shirts of fascism, they just go around the countryside spreading terror preventing Black people from voting. So you do have instances of counties where there are 1000s and 1000s of Black men allegedly ineligible to vote. But in the mid 1870s, it's just like one or two of them are voting. So I can't stand the history books that I read that say, "Oh, Samuel Tilden actually won the popular vote in 1876. Or Grover Cleveland, the first Democratic president, after the Civil War won the popular vote." Well, what was the popular vote if the entire Black vote is being suppressed through sheer terror? Right. And so I think we really need to pay attention to how violent terrorism can really basically completely up end, democratic governance, voting and elections, because that's pretty much what happened in the reconstruction south.

Kelly  38:19  
So as we've mentioned, you end the book with with women's suffrage and the 19th Amendment. And there are moments in in the conversations around the 15th Amendment where you can see a glimmer of what could have been if there had been universal suffrage at that moment, if there had been a coming together instead of a really splitting apart of different groups trying to pit rights against each other. So could you talk a little bit about that? That it's a long struggle, of course, for women's suffrage, but the ways in which it you know, instead of coming to this beautiful moment of supporting universal suffrage really does end up being sort of a like, "I'll take my piece of pie instead of fighting for everyone."

Dr. Manisha Sinha  39:05  
So that that is a very complicated story also, and, you know, under abolition, before the Civil War, a Black rights and women's rights had been interlinked, because so many of these feminists or I call abolitionist feminists came out of the abolition movement, fighting for against slavery for Black rights, and then fighting for women's rights. And you can see in the women's rights conventions, before the Civil War, the only men that are there are abolitionists, right, so there is an interlinking of the two causes and what we call intersectionality today, they didn't use fancy words, but they were very much aware of how, you know that they were fighting on on two fronts also. The tragedy during reconstruction is that when these reconstruction amendments come up, the most pressing issue is in fact, the state of the freed people, and violence against them, and if they were not slaves, they would be citizens. And then who would be citizens? Would they? Will it be all of them? Or would it just be men, as had become the custom in the United States? So we do have instances of women voting in New Jersey or, you know, in the early republic there, we do have those few exceptions to the rule. But it was adult male suffrage, basically, that people are fighting for at this time. And the problem, of course, is that when the 14th Amendment is proposed, a lot of feminists and radicals don't like it because it doesn't directly enfranchise Black men. It says, you know, if you don't give them the vote, you will suffer loss of representation. For some radicals, it didn't go far enough. Women don't like it. Elizabeth Cady Stanton famously said that if you introduced the word male into the US Constitution, for the first time now, it'll take a long time to get rid of it. The problem really arises with the 15th Amendment and some of the choices that Stanton and Anthony made. And they didn't have long roots in the abolition movement like another group of suffragists like Lucy Stone, and most of the Black women suffragists like Frances  Ellen Watkins Harper. They all came up through the abolition movement, and Stanton and Anthony decide to oppose the 15th Amendment giving Black men the right to vote, because it doesn't include women. And many Democrats used this as an opportunity to defeat Black male suffrage. They said, "Let's just tack on women. And that'll never pass Congress. And you know, and then we'll be fine." And the radicals realized that, so even those radicals who supported women's rights, like Charles Sumner, abolitionists, like Garrison Wendell Phillips, and Frederick Douglass say, "Okay, let's just go for Black men's, right to vote, and then we'll go for the 16th Amendment that will give women the right to vote." Unfortunately, both Stanton and Anthony made a horrible strategic decision to ally themselves with racist Democrats. And that leads to a split in the suffrage movement and the emergence of two separate suffrage associations. And that is a it's a is a real setback for the women's movement, because it's small enough, and then you're split into two different organizations. And they don't really come back together until 1890, on the eve of Lucy Stone's death, and that's one of her last wishes that they come up together. And that's when the momentum really picks up again, and they get the right to vote. But that concession to racism, I think, is again, one of those tragedies in the history of modern American feminism, because it kind of dogs them with the fall of reconstruction. They keep making these compromises with southern white women, excluding Black women, not wanting to talk about racial terror, lynching or segregation. These are not quote women's rights issues. They're seen as quote Black issues. But for Black women, they are very important issues along with the right to vote. So I mean, that that is the tragedy, I think of American feminism, that it's let, during reconstruction over the issue of race. And the tragedy, of course, is that Stanton is the foremost feminist philosopher in the United States after author, Margaret Fuller, in my opinion, and she gives in to elitism. You know, she's like, " I'm an educated daughter of the republic.I don't have the right to vote and all these enslaved people, and immigrant man, I'm getting the right to vote before me. And there's a sliver of elitism in her ideas there, with Anthony and all Black feminists, always, but that Anthony never showed any personal racism towards them, and in fact, stood up for them. But she makes a lot of these strategic concessions, expedient ones, which comes to dog the women's movement when people are, you know, less sympathetic to Black rights, because they're all fighting in the shadow of the defeat of Black rights, and reconstruction. So, to me, that's one of the tragedies of the suffrage movement. So even when we get the 19th Amendment, and even though Black women in the south tried to vote, once the 19th Amendment is passed, of course, they're not allowed to. They don't get the right to vote, right until 1965, the Voting Rights Act so those splits, you know, and pitting people and groups against one another is, I think, the tragedy of feminism and that they couldn't build that big tent feminism. And it's, it's something that I think has dogged the feminist movement a little bit until our times even though we've tried of course, to make build bridges and or to continue to do that. In fact, my next book project is going to be a history of feminism. So hopefully I can talk about all this upgraded that?

Kelly  45:03  
Well, there is so much more in this book that we're not going to get a chance to talk about. I really want to encourage listeners specifically of this podcast to read it because there are so many things that we've talked about on the podcast in little bits that are now you can see them in the full context. And I think so you know, there's, I've done an episode on Susie King Taylor and Lydia Maria Child, and these, you know, they they show up in this book, but in the context of what's going on for reconstruction. So can you tell listeners how to get a copy? 

Dr. Manisha Sinha  45:32  
Yes, you can go to your favorite independent bookstore, which I really encourage, or you could go to the Norton website, and purchase a copy of the book. And if you're really out of options, I'd say go to Amazon. Because I realized that there are some people who may not live close enough to a bookstore, or may not be able to purchase it from Norton. And there are many sites where the book is being sold. It is in hardcover right now. But it is also in Kindle, and an audio book is coming out. And you can even preorder the audiobook, and a paperback is coming out too. They already are rush printing the paperback. So I imagine the hardcover have sold. Not too badly, but I would encourage early readers to get it. And if they like it, leave a positive review that will be in Amazon, because I have a lot of people who tend to try to bring down those free for all kinds of reasons. But yeah, I would, I would encourage your your readers to get a copy of the book. I get it. I'm not just saying this, because I have written the book, but I think some of the issues in it are really timely. And some people have told me, you know, "Did you write this book anticipating all this?"I said, I wish I was clairvoyant. And I couldn't have anticipated everything, when I started this big book project 10 years ago," but really, we are at a crossroads again in the history of American democracy. And what I don't want to write about is the fall of the third American republic.

Kelly  47:04  
Was there anything else you wanted to make sure we talked about?

Dr. Manisha Sinha  47:07  
Just that the book looks not only at the long afterlife of slavery, and emancipation in the US, but also at long after lives of American empire, because this is the time when I see the wars against Native nations in the west, as not a continuation of the Civil War, which many historians have recently propounded. But I see them as the inauguration of a kind of a colonial mindset and that colonial warfare, the, again, the extreme brutality, the massacres against women and children, something that did not happen in the Civil War, on a wide scale, because the Union army was very, following Lincoln's Code of War, which is really the the germ of our modern international laws of warfare. The Confederate army did violate everything with impunity. When it came to Indian nations, the US Army was not restrained by any of these codes. And that's why I see them as colonial warfare. And then you can see this like moving into the 1898 Spanish Cuban American War when the United States colonizes Philippines, annexes Hawaii, gets the right to intervene in Cuban affairs whenever it wants to, and then is able to justify a lot of interventions for strategic and economic reasons. And in that sense, the United States is really following the European example of imperialism. This is the heyday of important European imperialism, the scramble for Africa and unfortunately, with the fall of reconstruction, that comes to be the norm in the US so even in terms of understanding where we are in terms of a kind of an imperial mindset towards other peoples in the world, which begins I think, with Indian warfare in the west, and the downfall of reconstruction. I think the book might be helpful.

Kelly  49:10  
Manisha, thank you so much for speaking with me. I learned so much from this book, and it's just been so great to talk with you. 

Dr. Manisha Sinha  49:16  
Thanks for having me, Kelly.

Teddy  49:46  
Thanks for listening to Unsung History. Please subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app. You can find the sources used for this episode and a full episode transcript @UnsungHistorypodcast.com. To the best of our knowledge, all audio and images used by Unsung History are in the public domain or are used with permission. You can find us on twitter or instagram @Unsung__History, or on Facebook @UnsungHistorypodcast. To contact us with questions, corrections, praise, or episode suggestions, please email Kelly@UnsungHistorypodcast.com. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate, review, and tell everyone you know. Bye!

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