Читать книгу Anglo-American Cultural Studies - Jody Skinner - Страница 52

blue beat grayAt least one winner and one loser of the Civil War is easy to determine: the Union forces (color blue) of the North beat the Confederate forces (color gray) of the South. The other winners and losers aren’t as clear. The former slaves were freed in name but often were faced with poverty and harassment. Former slave owners became bitter extremists; the grand plantations lay in ruin. While the sense of loss remained in the South – I can remember hearing as a boy in the Deep South the saying “the South will rise again” one hundred years after the end of the Civil War – the United States had remained united, the Union that LincolnLincoln, Abraham had sought to maintain would not be questioned again.

The very end of ReconstructionReconstruction is tainted by a political deal that mirrored in many ways the political corruption that had come to be associated with so many aspects of the decade after the war. In the 1876 presidential election the RepublicanRepublican Rutherford B. HayesHayes, Rutherford B., who didn’t win the popular vote, gained support in the electoral collegecollege ( 5) from three states in the South in exchange for the promise to withdraw federal troops from the former states of the Confederacy, thus ending Reconstruction and also delaying the attempts of many supporters of Reconstruction to give fully equal rightsequal rights to the newly-freed slaves. The promise of equal rights for African AmericansAfrican Americans was put on hold for nearly one hundred years until the Civil Rights movementCivil Rights movement of the 1960s.