THE SECOND FOUNDING
America's Age of Reconstruction, 1865–1877By Henrietta Walcott Maxwell
Length6h 15m
About this audiobook
The complete narrative history of Reconstruction, 1865-1877 — the Fourteenth Amendment, Black political power, the Freedmen's Bureau, and the counterrevolution that buried America's unfinished revolution.
On January 1, 1863, the crowd at Camp Saxton, South Carolina — a contraband camp on the old Smith Plantation at Port Royal — erupted when the Emancipation Proclamation was read aloud. Old men and women born into bondage began to sing "My Country 'Tis of Thee," and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, commanding the First South Carolina Volunteers, the first Black regiment in the Union Army, could not make them stop. What came next was the most revolutionary period in American history, and the nation abandoned it.
Henrietta Walcott Maxwell traces Reconstruction's full arc: from Andrew Johnson's 13,500 pardons that restored Confederate land while 40,000 freedpeople farmed Sea Island plots under Sherman's Special Field Order No. 15, through the Radical Republicans' constitutional revolution — Thaddeus Stevens, Charles Sumner, the Fourteenth Amendment, and the Fifteenth Amendment — to the Redeemer counterrevolution and the Compromise of 1877 that handed the South back to the men who had tried to destroy the Union.
Inside this Reconstruction history:
The promise denied — how Andrew Johnson issued 13,500 pardons in 1865, restored confiscated land to former Confederates, and gave the former ruling class the two years it needed to reestablish control before Congress could act (Chapter 3)
The Black Codes — Mississippi's vagrancy law that criminalized unemployment and handed convicted men to employers for up to a year; South Carolina's code that renamed enslaved people "servants" while preserving every mechanism of plantation labor (Chapter 4)
Thaddeus Stevens's arithmetic — his September 1865 proposal to confiscate Confederate estates over 500 acres, give 40 acres to each freedman family, and sell the remainder for $4 billion in school funding — and why it failed (Chapter 5)
Black political power — South Carolina's constitutional convention of 76 Black delegates out of 124, Robert Brown Elliott educated in England, Francis Cardozo educated at Glasgow; Mississippi registering 60,167 Black voters against 46,636 white in 1867 (Chapters 9, 7)
The Fourteenth Amendment's long sleep — from the Slaughterhouse Cases (1873) and Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) gutting its text, to Thurgood Marshall reaching for its equal protection clause in Brown v. Board (1954) (Chapter 6)
The historians' reckoning — from William Dunning's "negro domination" myth to W.E.B. Du Bois's 1935 demolition in Black Reconstruction to Eric Foner's 1988 synthesis — how America forgot and remembered (Chapter 23)
The Reconstruction Amendments — the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth — survived the Redeemer counterrevolution as "sleeping giants," available to every generation willing to use them. The freedpeople built churches, schools, and mutual aid societies in a dozen years; those institutions outlasted Jim Crow and became the organizational infrastructure of the civil rights movement. Reconstruction was America's unfinished revolution. Its work is still unfinished.
For readers of Eric Foner's RECONSTRUCTION and Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s STONY THE ROAD.
Audiobook details
GenreHistory
Length6 hrs 15 mins
Narrated byListen with 1,000+ voices
FormateBook with Audio
LanguageEnglish
Table of contents
1Introduction
2Author’s Note
3Prologue: The Promise of Freedom
4PART ONE: THE YEAR OF JUBILEE (1865)
5Chapter 1: Emancipation's Morning — The Freed People and the New World
Show all chaptersShow less
6Chapter 2: The Freedmen's Bureau — Federal Power and the New Order
7Chapter 3: Presidential Reconstruction — Andrew Johnson's Betrayal
8Chapter 4: Black Codes — The South's Attempt to Restore Bondage
9PART TWO: CONGRESSIONAL RECONSTRUCTION (1866–1870)
10Chapter 5: Radical Republicans — Stevens, Sumner, and the Revolutionary Program
11Chapter 6: The Fourteenth Amendment — Citizenship and Equal Protection
12Chapter 7: The Reconstruction Acts of 1867 — Military Occupation and Political Reorganization
13Chapter 8: The Fifteenth Amendment — The Right to Vote
14PART THREE: THE RECONSTRUCTED SOUTH (1868–1873)
15Chapter 9: Black Political Power — Legislators, Senators, and Governors
16Chapter 10: Reconstruction Governments — Achievements and Achievements
17Chapter 11: The Ku Klux Klan — Terror and the White Counterrevolution
18Chapter 12: Grant and Enforcement — Federal Power and Its Limits
19PART FOUR: FREEDOM AND ITS MEANINGS (1865–1877)
20Chapter 13: Forty Acres — Land, Labor, and the Promise Denied
21Chapter 14: The Schools of Freedom — Black Education in the New South
22Chapter 15: The Black Church — Institution, Community, and Resistance
23Chapter 16: Women in Reconstruction — Race, Gender, and Political Life
24PART FIVE: THE END OF RECONSTRUCTION (1873–1877)
25Chapter 17: The Panic of 1873 — Economic Collapse and Political Realignment
26Chapter 18: Redeemers — Massacre, Terror, and the Counterrevolution
27Chapter 19: The Disputed Election of 1876 — Democracy's Crisis
28Chapter 20: The Compromise of 1877 — The Betrayal of Black America
29PART SIX: LEGACIES (1877–PRESENT)
30Chapter 21: Jim Crow — The Architecture of Racial Subordination
31Chapter 22: What Reconstruction Achieved — The Permanent Gains
32Chapter 23: The Historians' Reconstruction — From Dunning to Du Bois and Beyond
33Chapter 24: The Second Reconstruction — Civil Rights and the Unfinished Work
34Epilogue: The Unfinished Revolution
35Acknowledgments
36Selected Bibliography
37About the Author
More from Henrietta Walcott Maxwell
A Brief History of IntelligenceMax S. Bennett12h 18m4.6 (6.6K)$29 · $0.00
Ghosts of HiroshimaCharles Pellegrino8h 59m4.5 (877)$23
Lily's PromiseLily Ebert, Dov Forman8h 54m4.6 (16.1K)$29 · $0.00
On Democracies and Death CultsDouglas Murray10h 38m4.6 (6.5K)$29 · $0.00
Across the RiverKent Babb11h 40m4.6 (927)$29 · $0.00
Balcony Over Jerusalem: A Middle East Memoir - Israel, Palestine and BeyondJohn Lyons12h 37m4.6 (1.4K)$33 · $0.00
BeyondStephen Walker15h 39m4.6 (3.2K)$33 · $0.00
Kings and PawnsHoward Bryant10h 9m4.6 (678)$29 · $0.00
No EscapeNury Turkel9h 30m4.6 (809)$28 · $0.00
Jubal Stone: U.S. Marshal: Blood Trail To Hell: A Western Adventure NovelCasey Nash3h 42m4.6 (3.2K)$18 · $0.00
Fall and RiseMitchell Zuckoff17h 23m4.6 (9.8K)$40 · $0.00
The SurvivorJosef Lewkowicz, Michael Calvin9h 22m4.6 (2.5K)$29 · $0.00
Always FaithfulThomas Schueman, Zainullah Zaki12h 12m4.6 (977)$29 · $0.00
The State of Society in France Before the Revolution of 1789 (Annotated)Alexis de Tocqueville17h 25m4.6 (1.2K)$2 · $0.00
All the Gallant MenDonald Stratton, Ken Gire5h 55m4.6 (11.8K)$24 · $0.00
Medgar and MyrlieJoy-Ann Reid10h 52m4.5 (27.8K)$29 · $0.00
The History of the Peloponnesian War (Annotated)Thucydides24h 3m4.6 (1.1K)$2 · $0.00
Where the Birds Never SingJack Sacco10h 31m4.6 (3.8K)$29 · $0.00
Serviceman J: The Untold Story of an NZSAS SoldierJamie Pennell5h 51m4.6 (452)$24 · $0.00
Valley of the BirdtailAndrew Stobo Sniderman, Douglas Sanderson10h 1m4.6 (2.4K)$29 · $0.00
You may also like
FreedomNathan Law6h 59m4.3 (417)$17
What HappenedScott McClellan12h 27m3.5 (2.4K)$23 · $0.00
Reconstruction Updated EditionEric Foner31h 33m4.4 (11.8K)$53 · $0.00
Hating Whitey and Other Progressive CausesDavid Horowitz9h 24m4.2 (290)$20 · $0.00
Policing the WombMichele Goodwin13h 15m4.5 (481)$23
High-RisersBen Austen13h 33m4.4 (2.8K)$33 · $0.00
The New Confessions of an Economic Hit ManJohn Perkins12h 22m4.2 (10.1K)$20
F*ck SilenceJoe Walsh6h 55m4.1 (1.4K)$24 · $0.00
The Brass Check A Study of American JournalismUpton Sinclair18h 34m4.2 (1.4K)$2.30
A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin (Summarized Edition)Harriet Beecher Stowe5h 54m4.0 (1.7K)$2
Adios, AmericaCoulter, Ann12h 51m4.0 (4.6K)Free
The Breakdown of Higher EducationJohn M. Ellis7h 47m4.2 (296)$17 · $0.00
No TreasonLysander Spooner3h 5m4.4 (1.2K)$1 · $0.00
HomewreckersAaron Glantz10h 10m4.3 (927)$29 · $0.00
Dream HoardersRichard V. Reeves4h 40m3.9 (3.3K)$20
Why is the Negro Lynched?Frederick Douglass1h 39m4.4 (32)$1 · $0.00
The Wilmington TenKenneth Robert Janken8h 52m4.0 (51)$20
Assata Taught MeDonna Murch6h 29m4.4 (185)$17 · $0.00
"Imperialism" and "The Tracks of Our Forefathers"Charles Francis Adams1h 31m$2 · $0.00
Madame RolandMathilde Blind8h 45m$1 · $0.00