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Reading response #3: The Commemoration of Death (Views of the war lead to…
Reading response #3: The Commemoration of Death
Decoration Day
The most immediate legacy of the war was mass death and carnage and how to deal with it. (64)
This day is central to the idea of how reconstruction practices overtook those of emancipation after the civil war (65)
Day of remembrance where the graves of civil war soldiers were decorated with flowers
The first decoration day celebration in the north included almost 10,000 people, many were former slaves (69)
Later became known as Memorial Day
brought forth the new movement of funeral orations
Views of the war lead to memorialization
Became commonly characterized as demonic. (74)
this is the starting point to the popular southern practice of Civil War memorialization. Reconstruction troops did little to stop them
Groups formed to lead the memorialization efforts
came up in print, such as books and pamphlets and rituals commemoration (78)
Days where monuments in the south were unveiled sometimes garnered bigger reactions than memorial day had
Memorial day in the North became known as a day of forgetting, forgiveness, and as a day to view those killed in the civil war from both sides as equal
Memorial Day, 1877 was one of the biggest celebrations, with a parade traveling down 5th avenue
Politics and elections
In elections from 1868 to 1875, the majority of voters had personal relationships to the effects of the Civil War and Reconstruction.(98)
Historians say that the post war elections were influenced by partisan imperative. (98)
In 1868, Democrats relied heavily on the use of white supremacist ideals to win voters
Democrats main goal was to turn the country against reconstruction. (103)
After the election of Grant, Republicans felt confident enough to say that reconstruction could be over. (105)
Tensions between the memories of the war and reconstruction grew in the election of 1872. (122)
"If 1874 was a 'referendum of Reconstruction,' then the 1876 presidential election gave the country a referendum on reunion." (135)
Reconstruction's End and the Klan
Many southern radicals saw reconstructions decline, and their re-entrance into the union as an opportunity to take control over the limitations of the fifteenth amendment, ie. its lack of restrictions of qualification tests. (107)
one of the biggest legacies of Reconstruction was its violence (110)
The KKK came to be seen as the savior of the South. (111)
A writer named Thomas Dixon Jr. played a huge role in the establishment of the idea that black people had caused the Civil War, and that the KKK had "reluctantly" become the hero's the South desperately needed. (111)
In the cities that did experience Klan Violence, it destroyed the Republican power established there. (114)
The Klan's violence would sometimes go as far as rape and sadism. (118)