preview

Analysis Of Eric Foner's 'Southern Redemption'

Decent Essays

Frightened into the Shadows for Southern Redemption During Reconstruction, the time period after the Civil War in between the years 1865 – 1877, the South changed from enforcing slavery to abolishing slavery. The document to be analyzed consists of the accounts of a man named Abram Colby, and how he lived in this time period. Throughout Reconstruction, treatment of black Southerners improved as they gained political power and new laws were created in their favor. This caused white Southerners to react violently, whereas black Southerners reacted defiantly, emphasizing their demand for equality and freedom. In 1872, a former slave named Abram Colby testified in Washington to a joint House and Senate committee because the Ku Klux Klan brutally beat him for refusing to step down from the Georgia legislature. As a Radical Republican, he refused to silence his voice in politics, so “they [the Klansmen] offered me [Colby] $5,000…” as a bribe to end his political power in Georgia. Colby reacted boldly, denying their request, thus the Klansmen reacted violently, using …show more content…

Moreover, the document links the changing definition of freedom for whites as self-ownership. In contrast, the changing definition of freedom for blacks meant having full political rights, citizenship, and owning land. In Eric Foner’s Voices of Freedom, a former slave’s petition to the president, who took his lands away to give to the previous owners states, “[t]his is our home, we have made These lands what they are,” for he demands to the president himself that they deserve the right to own land. The treatment of black Southerners differed greatly from white Southerners due to the idea of white supremacy. Colby’s story matters because Reconstruction aimed to rebuild the South, although that did not occur for black Southerners, since black oppression continued on after this time

Get Access