Assignment Task:
Compare the perspectives of the authors of readings 5 and 6 concerning the brief time period when freedmen were able to have a voice and representation in the government of southern states during the Reconstruction
Reading:
It was the most soul-sickening spectacle that America had ever been called upon to behold. Every principle of the old American polity was here reversed. In place of government by the most intelligent and virtuous part of the people for the benefit of the governed, here was government by the most ignorant and vicious part of the population for the benefit, the vulgar, materialistic, brutal benefit of the governing set.
Historian John W. Burgess, 1902
Reading:
In South Carolina, Mississippi and Louisiana, the proportion of Negroes was so large, their leaders of sufficient power, and the Federal control so effective that for the years l868-l874 the will of black labor was powerful; and so far as it was intelligently t y led, and had definite goals, it took perceptible steps toward public education, confiscation of large incomes, betterment of labor conditions, universal suffrage, and in some cases distribution of land to the peasant.
W.E.B. DuBois