A few weeks ago (August 15), I wrote an essay called “After Johnny,” in which I described a course I was planning to propose to teach for Osher in the spring of 2024. Here’s the link to that essay, in case you would like to see what it was all about.
I’ve submitted the proposal to teach this class, so now I have to prepare the presentation. This means doing a lot of reading and thinking about how I want to present the key ideas of approximately 30 years of American history – from 1870 to 1900 in a way that is comprehensive, accurate, and interesting for a group of very smart “seasoned” adults who value good teaching but do not suffer fools gladly. It is always more than a bit daunting to contemplate this challenge when I’m putting a new class together. I take some comfort in the fact that I haven’t totally “crashed and burned” yet, but there’s no guarantee that this won’t happen this time around.
I’m going to spend the next several weeks during my “Osher Tuesday” slot in this blog series to begin to flesh out the ideas for the class. I plan to focus on one key event for each hour of the course. The course will encompass six hours (three sessions that are two hours long), so I need to identify six events that will allow me to tell part of the story.
This week, I’m going to write about how I will address the Civil Rights challenges, accomplishments, and failures that I’ll be featuring during one hour of the course. My options under this general heading will focus on the hope embodied in the three post-Civil War Constitutional Amendments, the various plans for Reconstruction, the 1872 Amnesty Act that showed that “binding up the nation’s wounds” would involve a nationally declared amnesia about the war, and the 1896 Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson that illustrated how firmly white supremacy had become established across the country.
Right now, my plan is to focus on the 1872 Amnesty Act that essentially reversed most of the penalties imposed on former Confederates by the Fourteenth Amendment. Specifically, the Act removed voting restrictions and office-holding disqualification against most of the secessionists who rebelled in the American Civil War, except for "senators and Representatives of the Thirty-sixth and Thirty-seventh Congresses and officers in the judicial, military, and naval service of the United States, heads of Departments, and foreign ministers of the United States." The act was passed by the 42nd United States Congress and the original restrictive Act was passed by the United States Congress in May 1866. The 1872 Act affected over 150,000 former Confederate troops who had taken part in the American Civil War. You can read about it here.
To set this event in its historical context, I’ll need to tell the story of the three Constitutional Amendments that abolished slavery, guaranteed to former enslaved persons the equal protection of the law, and extended voting rights to former enslaved persons. I’ll need to tell the story of efforts at Reconstructing the Union – in both its mild and strict versions. Once the 1872 Amnesty Bill is enacted, the road to the total end of Reconstruction is clear, and is codified with the 1876 Presidential Election. Anchoring this entire story in the 1872 Amnesty Act will frame events in a way that should be both informative and interesting to the people who decide to take this course.
Here’s why this is important. I think we forget how quickly 19th-century Americans chose to put the Civil War behind them. The first few years after 1865 were caught up in re-uniting the states of the Confederacy, mending a war-torn economy, and healing the wounds of sectional division. The four million formerly enslaved African Americans were supported at some level by national policies in the immediate aftermath of the war, but defeated Confederate states continued to relegate the formerly enslaved population to the lowest rung in the postwar economic, political, and social order. The year 1876 marked the end of Reconstruction in practice, and formerly enslaved persons were left to their own devices after barely a decade of freedom – without the education, property, or opportunity that would have allowed them to thrive. The country was “over” it after 10 years. The powerful wanted to move on from the past.
This history is important and it is seldom taught in general history classes. As a former high school history teacher, I can tell you that the time we have to teach the totality of American history doesn’t allow many events to get more than a mention in an otherwise packed curriculum — and “teaching by mentioning” is never effective. One reason I chose to emphasize this 1872 Act is because it resonates a bit with what’s going on in modern American politics. There are lots of people who want to put the four years of the #PO1135809 administration behind us — to abandon the prosecution of individuals who participated in or otherwise abetted the efforts to reverse the results of the 2020 election so that we can “move on.”
In 1872 – and a few years later, in 1876 – the nation “moved on.” The result is the racially charged society we live in today, where the 100 years of racial discrimination between the Civil War and the 1960s civil rights movement fueled the re-emergence of white supremacy as the guiding principle of one of our major political parties. If the America of 1876 had not been so eager to “move on,” we could be living in a stable multi-racial democracy today. But we’re not. Talking about the abandonment of efforts to establish racial justice in the 1870s will give class members a framework for evaluating where we are today.
Karen, the historical connections you will make in this course are so important and so timely. Actually, your courses and so many others should be accessible to people who cannot attend Osher Institute classes in person. (Win, I hear you!)
On a personal note, I championed the recording idea and a “one click away” library of recorded classes when I lived in Williamsburg. (I have a membership with One Day University and used this as an example in my conversations with Osher Institute.)
For a lot of good reasons, recording classes was not possible at the time. However, the more I think about it and consider the many excellent courses offered this semester and the issues of not being able to physically attend classes, I can only hope someone will champion the idea again. 😎
This will be good!