PBS' "Reconstruction: The Second Civil War" 2nd Episode

After seeing the second and final episode of PBS' Reconstruction: The Second Civil War, I'm very impressed with how well director Llewellyn Smith was able to cover a complicated subject in a three-hour documentary for a general audience.

Where the first episode covers a two-year period, the second had the more difficult task of summarizing the following ten years in the same amount of time. It's not surprising that lots gets skimmed over. Thaddeus Stevens winds up representing the Northern Radical Republicans in the documentary, for instance. I didn't hear Charles Sumner mentioned, or Ben Butler, either, although the latter's name appears on the pivotal Civil Rights Act discussed near the end of the second episode.

What's remarkable is how well Smith was able to summarize the complicated struggle for African-American rights in the South at that time, with the cross-currents of economic problems and class and racial issues. The second episode focuses on several individuals, including to my surprise John Roy Lynch, a former slave from the Natchez area who became a Congressman from Mississippi. I had just read his account of that period a couple of months ago, which was first published in 1913, The Facts of Reconstruction. (As a reminder of how close that time is to ours in some ways, Lynch died in 1939, the year Hitler invaded Poland.)

I think the way Smith's documentary presents Reconstruction is very sound. Reconstructon  was a dramatic experiment. Historian Eric Foner in the second part calls it the most far-reaching experiment in biracial democracy that had been tried in the world up until that time. The documentary is good in showing how the "Redemption" movement that defeated Reconstructed relied on force, violence and terrorism to accomplish their aim. And the failure of Reconstruction was a genuine tragedy for American democracy, for the South and especially for African-American citizens.

A very well-done historical documentary.