Was their hope realized?: An 1866 depiction of an African American school in Charleston, S.C. Many such programs, however, failed to last or were cut short when Reconstruction ended.
Interview with Allen Guelzo: Reconstruction’s Lost Cause
By Sarah Richardson
OCTOBER 2018 • CIVIL WAR TIMES MAGAZINE
Allen Guelzo, Director of the Civil War Era Studies Program at Gettysburg College (allenguelzo.com), is the author of six Civil War histories and his most recent book, Reconstruction: A Concise History, details the problems afflicting the reintegration of the Confederacy into the Union. Optimism in the North was strong at first, he says. While reading John Greenleaf Whittier’s 1866 narrative poem Snowbound, he realized that the poet’s celebrated New England rural life was a template for Reconstruction. Many Northerners believed that creating a capitalist economy in the South was the first priority and felt, naively, that racial and political problems arising from emancipation would solve themselves.
http://www.historynet.com/interview-allen-guelzo-reconstructions-lost-cause.htm
