PBS' "Reconstruction: The Second Civil War" 1st Episode (Pt. 1 of 2)

I was favorably impressed with the first of the two installments of the PBS American Experience program on Reconstruction: The Second Civil War. Monday was the first airing, with the second part scheduled for Tuesday the 13th. (I'm also impressed at first glance with their Web site on the program linked above.)

The program gives a good picture of how central racial issues, more specifically the question of what degree of freedom would be permitted to former slaves, were in the Reconstruction period. The first episode focuses on the period of Presidential Reconstruction of 1865-1867, and covers the beginning of Congressional Reconstruction (or Radical Reconstruction) in 1867.

Presidential Reconstruction under Andrew Johnson followed a very lenient policy toward the former Rebels. As the documentary explains, former Confederates were initially prepared to accept a much harsher policy. Johnson's willingness to accept a quick readmission of white-dominated state governments to the Union and his generosity in pardoning planters who had been deeply involved in the rebellion encouraged white Southerners to resist more strenously than they might have in the face of a more determined policy from the start.

The first episode shows how the immediate postwar months saw efforts on the behald of the Army and the Freedmen's Bureau to carry out a land reform, remembered by the famous phrase "40 acres and a mule" (though that approach actually had only a limited application in reality). But Johnson was willing to quickly move to restore the power and property of the planters and countenanced the Black Codes in several Southern states that restricted freed blacks to field labor and imposed other drastic restrictions on them.

The show made me reflect that Andrew Johnson, himself from Andrew Jackson's Tennessee, represented both the promise and the limitations of antebellum Jacksonian democracy, particularly its Southern incarnation. Johnson himself was a nationalist, i.e., an American patriot who actively opposed secession.

(Cont. in Part 2)