Adam H. Domby & Simon Lewis 
Freedoms Gained and Lost 
Reconstruction and Its Meanings 150 Years Later

Reconstruction is one of the most complex, overlooked, and misunderstood periods of American history. The thirteen essays in this volume address the multiple struggles to make good on President Abraham Lincoln’s promise of a “new birth of freedom” in the years following the Civil War, as well as the counter-efforts including historiographical ones—to undermine those struggles. The forms these struggles took varied enormously, extended geographically beyond the former Confederacy, influenced political and racial thought internationally, and remain open to contestation even today. The fight to establish and maintain meaningful freedoms for America’s Black population led to the apparently concrete and permanent legal form of the three key Reconstruction Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, as well as the revised state constitutions, but almost all of the latter were overturned by the end of the century, and even the former are not necessarily out of jeopardy. And it was not just the formerly enslaved who were gaining and losing freedoms. Struggles over freedom, citizenship, and rights can be seen in a variety of venues. At times, gaining one freedom might endanger another. How we remember Reconstruction and what we do with that memory continues to influence politics, especially the politics of race, in the contemporary United States. Offering analysis of educational and professional expansion, legal history, armed resistance, the fate of Black soldiers, international diplomacy post-1865 and much more, the essays collected here draw attention to some of the vital achievements of the Reconstruction period while reminding us that freedoms can be won, but they can also be lost.

Table of Content

Introduction
Simon Lewis and Adam H. Domby | 1
Whom Is Reconstruction For?
Bruce E. Baker | 17
Implementing Public Schools: Competing Visions and Crises in Postemancipation Mobile, Alabama
Hilary N. Green | 39
Reconstruction Justice: African American Police Officers in Charleston and New Orleans
Samuel Watts | 57
1874: Self-Defense and Racial Empowerment in the Alabama Black Belt
Michael W. Fitzgerald | 78
“They Mustered a Whole Company of Kuklux as Militia”:
State Violence and Black Freedoms in Kentucky’s Readjustment
Shannon M. Smith | 96
A Woman of “Weak Mind”: Gender, Race, and Mental Competency in the Reconstruction Era
Felicity Turner | 121
Idealism versus Material Realities: Economic Woes for Northern African American Families
Holly A. Pinheiro, Jr. | 143
“Works Meet for Repentance”: Congressional Amnesty and Reconstructed Rebels
Brian K. Fennessy | 159
Toward an International History of Reconstruction
Don H. Doyle | 181
The Dream of a Rural Democracy:
US Reconstruction and Abolitionist Propaganda in Rio de Janeiro, 1880–1890
Sergio Pinto-Handler | 212
Lessons from “Redemption”: Memories of Reconstruction Violence in Colonial Policy
Adam H. Domby | 232
Remembering War, Constructing Race Pride, Promoting Uplift:
Joseph T. Wilson and the Black Politics of Reconstruction and Retreat
Matthew E. Stanley | 249
Fact, Fancy, and Nat Fuller’s Feast in 1865 and 2015
Ethan J. Kytle | 276
Acknowledgments | 305
List of Contributors | 307
Index | 309

About the author

Simon Lewis has been teaching African and Third World Literature at the College of Charleston since 1996. A former long-time director of the Carolina Lowcountry and Atlantic World (CLAW) program at the College, Dr. Lewis is the coeditor of three volumes of essays in USC Press’s Carolina Lowcountry and Atlantic World series: The Fruits of Exile: Central European Intellectual Immigration to America in the Age of Fascism, Ambiguous Anniversary: The Bicentennial of the International Slave Trade Bans, and The Civil War as Global Conflict: Transnational Meanings of the American Civil War. He is also the author of two monographs on African literature and numerous refereed articles primarily on South African writers. He was recognized in 2021 with a Governor’s Award in the Humanities from South Carolina.