One of the most remarkable interchanges of those momentous years, the "Colloquy" between Sherman, Stanton, and the black leaders offered a rare lens through which the experience of slavery and the aspirations that would help to shape Reconstruction came into sharp focus. Americans, black and white, would now have to come to terms with the war's legacy, and decide whether they would build an interracial democracy on the ashes of the Old South. On the horizon loomed the final collapse of the Confederacy, the irrevocable destruction of slavery, and the turbulent postwar era known as Reconstruction. Less than three weeks earlier, Sherman, at the head of a sixty-thousand-man Union army, had captured the city, completing his March to the Sea, which cut a swath of destruction through one of the most productive regions of the slave South.
The encounter took place at a pivotal moment in American history.
On the evening of January 12, 1865, twenty leaders of the local black community gathered in Savannah, Georgia, for a discussion with General William T. Now the DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University, Foner has written about America's social and intellectual history since 1970, when he wrote Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men, about the Civil War and the Republican Party. In movements for social justice that have built on the legal and political accomplishments of Reconstruction, and in the racial tensions that still plague American society, the momentous events of Reconstruction reverberate in modern-day America." The drastic changes in American society are pointed up by three amendments to the Constitution: the 13th abolished slavery the 14th guaranteed birthright citizenship and equal rights for all Americans and the 15th barred states from discriminating on the basis of race in voting rights.įoner writes, "The unresolved legacy of Reconstruction remains a part of our lives.
Historian Eric Foner analyzes the fate of those promises in Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction. In the period after the Civil War, former slaves were made promises of equality and citizenship by the federal government. Joshua Brown/American Social History Project Also exhibiting Instruments of Torture used to Punish Slaves." The caption for this 1863 image originally read: "Wilson Chinn, a Branded Slave from Louisiana.
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