by Michael T. Heath

Created on: August 11, 2011   Last Updated: August 12, 2011

The period known as 'Reconstruction' following the U.S. Civil War was a bold opportunity lost. The concept of elevating the former slaves (mainly in the South) to de facto equality with their fellow White citizens was inspirational, politically strategic and ultimately doomed to failure in the grandest scheme we have ever attempted to make things right with a wronged people. Although this nation did repatriate Japanese-Americans after WWII and compensate many of them for lost property, we've never tried such honorable means to deal with other aggrieved groups on such a grand scale - before or since. Our historic challenges in facing up to the virtual genocide of millions of Native Americans - the unfair dealings and outright theft of almost this entire continent - were never so broadly adopted as was Reconstruction. For one thing, we passed not one but three separate Amendments to the Constitution to address their plight, forcing the rebel states to pass these new tenets of law before they'd be allowed to return as states in the Union with full rights.

These amendments lent voting rights and all the other benefits of citizenship to the newly-freed Blacks, enabling some to even hold office briefly during this period. Blacks could now farm their own lands; move about freely and marry one another without so much as a by-your-leave from the former masters who had held them as chattel before the war. Some used this opportunity to get away from the South entirely - a privilege of freedom of movement which had only been gained by traveling the Underground Railway in slave days. The country as a whole was seeing the spectacle of slaves becoming men and women right before their eyes, and it was a stunning change.

Of course, not all Blacks who came to the North were welcome. There were many Union men and women who felt that Blacks were inferior to Whites - and no Constitutional Amendment was about to rattle that belief. Blacks often found that they couldn't live in the most desirable parts of towns; couldn't hold most of the best-paying , skilled jobs; couldn't marry Whites or mingle with them too casually. Separate but equal? Not exactly. However, the resentment over losing the war in the South was small potatoes compared to their outright hatred of the new status for Blacks amongst them. Blacks were shunned socially just as they had been prior to the rebellion, and elements of the former Confederate military began harassing southern Blacks with the same organized violence

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