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Reconstruction: Voices from America’s First Great Struggle for Racial Equality

The tumultuous aftermath of the Civil War comes to dramatic life in this sweeping new collection of firsthand writing

Edited by Brooks D. Simpson

“Our most fiercely fought conflict over racial equality was not the Civil War—it was Reconstruction. This momentous and bloody period, highly pertinent to the present, is still far too obscure. Library of America has taken a major step toward correcting that with this superbly well-chosen collection.” — Nicholas Lemann, author of Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War

Overview
News & Views
Contributors

Overview

Story of the Week Levi Nelson and Benjamin Brim, “The Colfax Massacre Trial”
April 13, 2023

Story of the Week Frederick Douglass, “Reconstruction”
February 25, 2022

Video How W.E.B. Du Bois restored Black eyewitness accounts to the history of Reconstruction
November 30, 2021

The defeat of the Confederacy and the adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865 brought about the final destruction of slavery in the United States. Americans were confronted for the first time with the possibility of creating a republic dedicated to the principle of racial equality. What followed over the next twelve years was one of the most complex, inspiring, and ultimately tragic eras in American history. Reconstruction: Voices from America’s First Great Struggle for Racial Equality brings this tumultuous and fateful period to dramatic and violent life through the vivid testimony of more than sixty participants and observers. Here is a vitally important book for anyone interested in this crucial period and its inescapable relevance for today.

Historian Brooks D. Simpson presents more than 120 speeches, letters, newspaper and magazine articles, reports, and testimonies by famous figures—Frederick Douglass, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Andrew Johnson, Thaddeus Stevens, Ulysses S. Grant, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Mark Twain, Albion Tourgée—as well as dozens of lesser-known men and women, black and white, northern and southern. Through their words, readers experience the fierce contest between President Andrew Johnson and the Republican Congress that led to the nation’s first presidential impeachment; the adoption of the revolutionary Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments; the growth of black political power in the South; and the murderous violence of the Ku Klux Klan and other terrorist groups that, combined with northern weariness, indifference, and hostility, eventually resulted in the restoration of white supremacy in the former Confederate states. Testimony by Cynthia Townsend, Maria Carter, and Margaret Ann Caldwell records the relentless cruelty of white mobs and assassins, while speeches by Joseph H. Rainey, Robert Brown Elliott, and Richard Harvey Cain demonstrate the eloquence, passion, and courage with which the first African American congressmen addressed the nation in the cause of racial justice.

Reconstruction includes a chronology of events, brief biographies of the writers and helpful historical notes, full-color endpaper illustrations, and an index.

See the table of contents (PDF)

Brooks D. Simpson, editor, is ASU Foundation Professor of History at Arizona State University and the author of Let Us Have Peace: Ulysses S. Grant and the Politics of War and Reconstruction, 1861–1868, The Reconstruction Presidents, and Ulysses S. Grant: Triumph over Adversity, 1822–1865. He is a co-editor of The Civil War: Told by Those Who Lived It, a unique firsthand narrative published in four volumes by the Library of America.

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

Project support for this volume was provided by William R. Berkley and The Berkley Family Foundation.

This volume is available for adoption in the Guardian of American Letters Fund.
News & Views

Story of the Week Levi Nelson and Benjamin Brim, “The Colfax Massacre Trial”
April 13, 2023

Story of the Week Frederick Douglass, “Reconstruction”
February 25, 2022

Video How W.E.B. Du Bois restored Black eyewitness accounts to the history of Reconstruction
November 30, 2021

Story of the Week Maria Carter, “The Murder of John Walthall”
May 14, 2021

Story of the Week Joseph H. Rainey, “The Destruction of a Free Ballot”
January 15, 2021
Contributors

Jourdon Anderson
Sidney Andrews
Susan B. Anthony
Francis Preston Blair
Frank P. Blair
Benjamin Brim
David Brundage
Richard Harvey Cain
Margaret Ann Caldwell
Maria Carter
Maria F. Chandler
Salmon P. Chase
Georges Clemenceau
Richard Henry
Sarah A. Dickey
Frederick Douglass
Charles A. Eldredge
Robert Brown Elliott
Joseph S. Fullerton
James A. Garfield
William Lloyd Garrison
Ulysses S. Grant
Horace Greeley
Andrew J. Hamilton
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
Lewis Hayden
Rutherford B. Hayes
Abram Hewitt
William W. Holden
Marcus S. Hopkins
Oliver O. Howard
Robert G. Ingersoll
Harriet Jacobs
Andrew Johnson
Eugene Lawrence
Abraham Lincoln
Isaac Loveless
John R. Lynch
Christopher G. Memminger

Oliver P. Morton
Levi Nelson
Joseph Noxon
Wendell Phillips
Edwards Pierrepont
James S. Pike
Joseph H. Rainey
James T. Rapier
Carl Schurz
Robert K. Scott
Philip H. Sheridan
Charles C. Soule
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
George L. Stearns
Thaddeus Stevens
George Stoneman
Charles Sumner
Albion W. Tourgée
Cynthia Townsend
Mark Twain
Elihu B. Washburne
Thomas Whitehead

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