Word: stampp
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...RECONSTRUCTION, 1865-1877 by Kennefh M. Stampp. 228 pages. Knopf...
Impenitent Losers. In this reassessment of the period after Appomattox, Kenneth Stampp, professor of history at the University of California at Berkeley, calls the Southern version dead wrong. He is only one of dozens of contemporary historians who have recently undertaken to reconstruct the Reconstruction. Of these revisionists, Stampp is easily the most provocative. His proposition is that the impenitent postwar South set to work at once to restore the very order that it had supposedly yielded in defeat. The idea was to negate the war's outcome...
...this cause, says Stampp, the North served as unwitting accomplice. Lincoln's assassination propelled Andrew Johnson into the White House, a kind-hearted and derivative man anxious to implement Lincoln's injunction to let the South up easy. To staff the governments of the secessionist states, he granted wholesale pardons to Confederate officers and civil servants-and such men did not waste time accepting the chance to preside...
They simply moved to install the status quo ante in all but name, Stampp charges. Before the U.S. Congress reconvened in December 1865, the so-called "Johnson" state governments "had introduced the whole pattern of disenfranchisement, discrimination and segregation into the postwar South." Suffrage was restricted to whites; no effective provision was made for Negro education. The new "Black Codes" severely limited Negro rights. Modeled on the prewar slave codes, they permitted Negroes to marry other Negroes (but not whites), granted them a nominal right to own property and in some states bound the former slaves to their farms...
This, after all, was what the Civil War had been fought for. And the Republican Radicals were quite within their rights in insisting on full Negro citizenship. Historian Stampp's premise is that the insistence was gently applied, despite the bayonets, and considering the fact that, after all, these were victors dealing with the vanquished. All that the North ever demanded, in fact, was full equality for the Negro South; and if the conquered white South had complied, the armed troops would have been withdrawn...