Reconstruction

The Walter Evans Collection of Frederick Douglass and Douglass Family Papers, described as “the most extraordinary private collection of Douglass manuscript material in the world” by David Blight, Sterling Professor of History, of African American Studies, and of American Studies at Yale. The Beinecke Library presents this discussion about processing and digitizing this major new collection.

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Revisit a extraordinary period in African American history following the abolition of slavery. The Reconstruction gave birth to a new class of free men and opportunities, then devolved into a new form of slavery and disenfranchisement defined by the Jim Crow South. 

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The ideal of freedom is an innovative notion that can be found at the heart of America's founding principles. This ideal is embodied in the Declaration of Independence and protected by the Constitution. But freedom -- especially for African Americans -- has been elusive, fought for through social movements and struggle.

Explore at The Henry Ford

From the American Revolution through the end of Reconstruction, black Bostonians pushed to expand the boundaries of freedom and citizenship in Boston, Massachusetts and the United States. Meet Boston's black community leaders, abolitionists, and activists and explore the ways in which they strategically used the power of public memory in their pursuit of freedom.

Explore at the Museum of African American History Boston & Nantucket

In this lecture, Professor Blight begins his engagement with Reconstruction. Reconstruction, Blight suggests, might best be understood as an extended referendum on the meaning of the Civil War. Even before the war’s end, various constituencies in the North attempted to control the shape of the post-war Reconstruction of the South. 

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Professor Blight continues his discussion of the political history of Reconstruction. The central figure in the early phase of Reconstruction was President Andrew Johnson. Under Johnson’s stewardship, southern whites held constitutional conventions throughout 1865, drafting new constitutions that outlawed slavery but changed little else.

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Professor Blight begins this lecture in Washington, where the passage of the first Reconstruction Act by Congressional Republicans radically altered the direction of Reconstruction. The Act invalidated the reconstituted Southern legislatures, establishing five military districts in the South and insisting upon black suffrage as a condition to readmission.

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This lecture opens with a discussion of the myriad moments at which historians have declared an “end” to Reconstruction, before shifting to the myth and reality of “Carpetbag rule” in the Reconstruction South. Popularized by Lost Cause apologists and biased historians, this myth suggests that the southern governments of the Reconstruction era were dominated by unscrupulous and criminal Yankees who relied on the ignorant black vote to rob and despoil the innocent South. 

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This lecture focuses on the role of white southern terrorist violence in bringing about the end of Reconstruction. Professor Blight begins with an account the Colfax Massacre. Colfax, Louisiana was the sight of the largest mass murder in U.S. history, when a white mob killed dozens of African Americans in the April of 1873. 

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If you'd prefer to listen to Professor David Blight's course on the History of Reconstruction on Apple Podcasts rather than watching the videos, this link will take you to the audio-only course. This program explores the causes, course, and consequences of the American Civil War, from the 1840s to 1877. The primary goal of the course is to understand the multiple meanings of a transforming event in American history. Four broad themes are closely examined: the crisis of union and disunion in an expanding republic; slavery, race, and emancipation as a national problem, personal experience, and social process; the experience of modern, total war for individuals and society; and the political and social challenges of Reconstruction.

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About 175 years have passed since a fugitive slave named James Pennington became the first African American to study at Yale. The university did not permit Pennington, a blacksmith by trade who had settled in New Haven, to matriculate or earn a degree. But he was allowed to audit classes at the Divinity School from 1834 to 1839, and his studies enabled him to be ordained.

Read in Yale Alumni Magazine

James W. C. Pennington (1807-1870) was one of Yale’s First African American students. He attended classes at YDS in 1834, and in 1841, he wrote what is thought to be the first history of African Americans, The Origin and History of the Colored People. His autobiographical narrative was published in 1849 under the title The Fugitive Blacksmith.

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Entire electronic book
Yale honors Pennington

When Edward Alexander Bouchet was born on September 15, 1852, in New Haven, there was little likelihood of him one day attending nearby Yale University (known at the time as Yale College). Though there were no policy statements excluding African Americans, and those in charge likely denied the existence of any “unwritten” policy to that effect, no known black student had ever attended Yale.

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Image: Bouchet's Graduating Class

Recent news about the auction—and acquisition by Yale Manuscripts and Archives—of a collection of the papers of Richard Henry Green, Class of 1857, has led to the discovery of a lost milestone in Yale history. For nearly 150 years, his racial identity had been overlooked.

Read in Yale Alumni Magazine
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A young Black man with the grades and the desire to attend the Yale School of Medicine in the 1800s faced seemingly insurmountable odds, but the power of relationships is what made it possible for Courtlandt Van Rensselaer Creed to beat those odds, said Yale professor emeritus Curtis Patton, recounting Creed’s path to Yale in a recent talk at the Yale University School of Nursing.

Read in Yale News

Explore the Yale Black Alumni Association's profiles of more pioneering African American Yale alumni from the pre-Civil Rights Movement era. 

Read in Yale News

Frederick Douglass spent his life fighting for justice and equality. Born into slavery in 1818, he escaped as a young man and became a leading voice in the abolitionist movement. People everywhere still find inspiration today in his tireless struggle, brilliant words, and inclusive vision of humanity. Douglass's legacy is preserved here at Cedar Hill, where he lived his last 17 years.

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In 1881, Booker T. Washington arrived in Alabama and started building Tuskegee Institute both in reputation and literally brick by brick.  He recruited the best and the brightest to come and teach here including George Washington Carver who arrived in 1896.  Carver’s innovations in agriculture, especially with peanuts, expanded Tuskegee’s standing throughout the country. 

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George Washington Carver rose from slavery to become a renowned educator, scientist, artist, and humanitarian. An innovator and idealist, he had a remarkable understanding of the natural world. Carver devoted his life to research and finding practical alternatives to improving agriculture and the economic condition of African-Americans in the South.

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This exhibit explores the life and legacy of Maggie L. Walker (1864-1934), civil rights activist and trailblazing entrepreneur. The beloved African American community leader devoted her life to defeating racism, sexism, and economic oppression.  Mrs. Walker chartered a bank, a newspaper, and a store 17 years before American women had the right to vote, and fostered black entrepreneurialism when Jim Crow laws threatened African American progress.

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Former slave Robert Smalls (1839-1915) is one of the most significant figures of Reconstruction. In 1862, motivated to free himself, his family and his crew, he commandeered a Confederate transport ship and sailed it into Union-controlled waters. His tremendous courage and capabilities persuaded President Abraham Lincoln that African Americans should be allowed to join the Union army. In this virtual tour, meet his great-great-grandson, Michael Moore, and hear his ancestors' story first-hand while visiting significant sites in Smalls' history.

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Reconstruction was a process that took place in communities throughout the nation. Many units of the national park system, as well as sites managed by state, local, and private entities preserve locations and stories that tell the story of this crucial transition from slavery to freedom in the aftermath of Civil War.

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Hiram Rhodes Revels (1827-1901) of Mississippi was the first African American to serve in the United States Senate when he filled the seat of former president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis. Revels served just over a year from February 25, 1870, to March 13, 1871. Last year marked the 150th anniversary of his first speech on the Senate floor.

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About Hiram Revels

in 1874, South Carolina Representative Richard Harvey Cain advocated for a Civil Rights Bill that would guarantee equal rights, end segregated public schools and outlaw public discrimination. Speaking on the U.S. Congress floor, he faced racial antagonism from democratic colleagues and earned the admiration of republican contemporaries as he argued with humor, eloquence, and an unflappable disposition. 

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About Richard Harvey Cain

Ida B. Wells emerged in the 1890s as the leading voice against the lynching of African Americans following the violent lynching of three of her friends.  Beginning with an editorial in newspaper she owned, Memphis Free Speech in 1892 shortly after their deaths, she organized an international campaign that lead to two speaking tours in England in 1893 and 1894. 

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Yale Professor Crystal Feimster on Ida B. Wells

Historians describe the debate over extending civil rights to former slaves that divided the country after the Civil War. The same issues would re-emerge decades later, in the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

Read article in The American Experience

A summary of the major events that shaped the Reconstruction from 1863 - 1877.

Follow timeline in The American Experience

John R. Lynch was a former slave who became the first African-American Speaker of the Mississippi House of Representatives in 1873. An attorney, military officer, and writer, he is widely remembered in part for his book The Facts of Reconstruction.

Read at The Gutenberg Project

Yale Professor of English and African American Studies, Jacqueline Goldsby's incisive study takes on one of the grimmest secrets in America’s national life—the history of lynching and, more generally, the public punishment of African Americans

A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature

Yale's Peter V. and C. Van Woodward Professor of History, African American Studies, Glenda Gilmore, co-edits this volume. Here, some of the most innovative scholars of southern history question Jim Crow’s sway, evolution, and methods over the course of a century.

Jumpin’ Jim Crow: Southern Politics from Civil War to Civil Rights

Yale's Sterling Professor of American History, David Blight, writes an intellectual history of Civil War memory, rooted in the work of Robert Penn Warren, Bruce Catton, Edmund Wilson, and James Baldwin.

American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era