Chapter 16 - Reconstruction and Civil Rights

Summary

Most histories of Reconstruction begin their narrative in December 1863 when President Abraham Lincoln announced his Ten Percent Plan, reserving most of the authority to restore the collapsing Confederacy in the executive branch. Frederick Douglass also thought that Reconstruction began in 1863, but in January rather than in December. That month, after the final Emancipation Proclamation was issued, the War Department at long last permitted states to recruit black soldiers, which Douglass believed was the first step toward black citizenship and voting rights. Although Republicans envisioned Reconstruction as a policy only for the Confederacy, Douglass understood that the entire nation required political reclamation. If William Lloyd Garrison and a good number of white abolitionists assumed their struggle concluded with the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in December 1865, Douglass understood that the fight had just begun. He knew that the antithesis of slavery was not freedom, but equality.