Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Abbreviations
- Foreword
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Wartime Washington
- 3 The Freedmen's Bureau in the District of Columbia
- 4 Congressional Reconstruction in the District of Columbia
- 5 Reconstructing the City Government
- 6 Race, Radicalism, and Reconstruction
- 7 A City and a State
- 8 From Biracial Democracy to Direct Rule
- 9 Reconstruction in the Nation's Capital
- Index
- References
6 - Race, Radicalism, and Reconstruction
Grassroots Republican Politics
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2012
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Abbreviations
- Foreword
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Wartime Washington
- 3 The Freedmen's Bureau in the District of Columbia
- 4 Congressional Reconstruction in the District of Columbia
- 5 Reconstructing the City Government
- 6 Race, Radicalism, and Reconstruction
- 7 A City and a State
- 8 From Biracial Democracy to Direct Rule
- 9 Reconstruction in the Nation's Capital
- Index
- References
Summary
Introduction
For a few years after the Civil War, the enfranchisement of male African Americans opened up the space for an extraordinary efflorescence of political organizing, grassroots activism, and community development. It has become clear from recent studies of grassroots Reconstruction, by, for example, Steven Hahn, Michael W. Fitzgerald, Julie Saville, Rebecca J. Scott, and John C. Rodrigue, that freedpeople's political activity in the postbellum South served a much wider range of practical and psychological functions than merely the exercise of an abstract constitutional right. Not only in the countryside of the South but also in cities such as Charleston, Richmond, and Mobile, freedpeople organized politically, converting the newly established Republican Party to serve the social and economic needs of their communities. However briefly and however imperfectly, the Republican Party acted as a force for social change. “More than a political party,” says Saville, “a social movement was in the making.”
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Washington during Civil War and ReconstructionRace and Radicalism, pp. 184 - 210Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011
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