Exhibition Review

The exhibition's core argument follows the historiographical contours shaped by co-curator Eric Foner and other recent scholars of the period. Reconstruction was a time of real progress for newly freed slaves, genuine attempts to create interracial democratic politics, and significant efforts to redefine the federal government's role in protecting individual rights. Conversely, the exhibit lays to rest the old interpretations of the era—written by Southern historians at the turn of the century who sought to justify white supremacy—that emphasized the purported political corruption of black legislators and their Northern supporters.	1
"America's Reconstruction" consists of six topical sections. "New Birth of Freedom" explores how Union army officials, black troops, Freedmen's Bureau agents, and emancipated slaves all contributed to the political and economic groundwork for subsequent Reconstruction policies even while the war was still raging. "Slave Labor to Free Labor" examines the transformation of bound agricultural workers into sharecroppers and urban black artisans' struggle with persistent racial discrimination and economic exploitation. "The Meaning of Freedom: Black and White Responses to the End of Slavery" looks at how African Americans reunited families, legalized marriages, and established black churches, schools, and colleges; as well as how Southern whites memorialized the Confederate dead and created an ideology of martyrdom and crucifixion to surround their myth of the Lost Cause.	2
"Rights and Power: The Politics of Reconstruction" is the one section of the exhibit that focuses on the more familiar story of how Radical Republicans in Congress fought President Andrew Johnson for control over national policy concerning readmission of the defeated Southern states to the Union. Out of this struggle emerged the Reconstruction Amendments to the Constitution, which fundamentally restructured the legal powers of state and federal governments. "Resistance to Reconstruction" centers on the Ku Klux Klan and its concerted campaigns of political terrorism, as well as black leaders' efforts to resist such intimidation and fulfill their new roles as public officials.	. . .