Chapter One: Reconstructing Reconstruction
- What are your general perceptions about what you read?
- How does Carol Anderson understand white rage? What do you think of that concept?
- Why, do you think, didn’t the US plan better for emancipation?
- What were Lincoln’s views on race? What were his motivations and how do we understand his actions during the Civil War?
- Can you point to any instances of black agency, i.e. when black people provided for themselves post-emancipation?
- By the end of the war, black people made up 10 percent of the Union Army. Nearly 40,000 died during the war. Are you surprised they put that much faith in the institutions (in this case the army) of a country that did not treat them as full citizens?
- Why did white people feel so threatened? What were people lashing out or reacting to?
- Discuss some of the violence that took place during Reconstruction. Why was it so prevalent?
- What was President Andrew Johnson’s approach to stabilizing the country after the war? Why was there such a rush on his part to reconciliation and normalization with the South?
- When you hear about the violence and animosity of the Reconstruction period, does the US sound like a different country today or one you still recognize this far from those events?
