For Our final assignment this semester we watch a documentary “The
Second Civil War” on the reconstruction of the country after the Civil
War. The Narrater talk about the thing that unfolds after the Civil War
was over in efforts to reconstruct the country, and there are many
things going on at this time. The slaves are now freed, and the
government has no clear idea of what they are supposed to do with the
freed man. The freedmen had to find their own place in the country. The
country has to find a way to come together after a war between its own
people. Southerners have to accept they lost, and that thing will not be
the same. The southerner also fear what will happen to them. If they
will be punished for their rebellion, and how. When Lincoln dies all the
plans he had to die with him as well. The country now has a new
president who shared very different view than those of the former
President Lincoln. The documenter is really good at explaining how both
sides feel about the future that is ahead of them and how everyone is
trying to deal with it. For example, it gives you the case of Kate Stone
And how her family almost lost everything during the war being of the
side of the Confederacy. They showed how the freedmen felt when having
to give the land back to the owners and work as controlled laborers. We
saw the struggles that the whites had because the African Americans no
longer obeyed.
Before Lincoln was murdered his approach was to send
Stanton to the south to talk to black minister in the south he wanted to
know what was their vision for their future in the south. Lincoln even
Wanted to know what the Civil War had meant to them. We saw a little of
what Lincoln and thought the country should look like. Such as he
thought that African American veterans deserved the right to vote. He
was moving Toward more equality for all. When Andrew Johnson took
Lincoln place as President of the United Sates. Johnson had very
different views he was from the south, and he was known to own a few
slaves, but he had a strong belief in the union. One of the reasons
Lincoln chose him was to show the south he had some tie to them. The
vision that Johnson had of the reconstruction was very different.
Johnson was not worried about the freedman he was more sympathetic to
the poor white people. We saw how he took back the land that was given
to the freedman by the special order #15 of General Sherman. Johnson’s
action gave way to a very horrible future for the now Freedman.
During
class, we saw four different pictures that depicted the past, and what
the African American went thought. We discussed how they were, lynched,
how their schools were burned down and the different way they were kept
from voting. We also read through a laborer contract and discussed how
this labor contract just made the freedmen dependent of the whites. Not
only by the south but by northerners to, their fate as freedmen were
turning out to be more uncertain and brutal than before. All we spoke in
class left me wounding what if Lincoln had never died would the future
of the freed man have been the same or would they had a better life?
Would Lincoln had found a better was to reconstruct the nation and
really give everyone a better future?