“No relief this side of the grave.”

ED: Welcome to BackStory, the show that explores the history behind today’s headlines. I’m Ed Ayers.

NATHAN: I’m Nathan Connolly.

JOANNE: And I’m Joanne Freeman.

ED: If you’re new to the podcast, Joanne, Nathan, our friend, Brian Balogh, and I are all historians. And every week, we take a topic in the news and explore it across American history. And today, Joanne, Nathan, and I would like to talk about something that shows up in the news every so often. But even when it does, it’s rarely a headline. You probably just hear it in passing.

REPORTER: Louisiana’s first non-white governor since Reconstruction.

REPORTER: The first black senator to be elected in the South since Reconstruction.

REPORTER: Cotton prices have skyrocketed to the highest price since Reconstruction.

MALE SPEAKER: Reconstruction. 1920s. Before in the 1870s.

NATHAN: So I’m going to go out on a limb and say that today’s show is about Reconstruction.

ED: Very bold, Nathan. Yes.

NATHAN: I like to take chances.

ED: Yes, and your boldness is going to be repaid today, Nathan, because our show today marks the 150th anniversary this month of the Military Reconstruction Acts, what people call radical reconstruction.

JOANNE: OK, but Ed, if we were just basing our assumptions about Reconstruction based on those voices we just heard, we would think it had something to do with African-Americans getting elected to office in the South until it didn’t happen in the South. And it has something or other to do with cotton prices being really high.

ED: Yeah, you really nailed it there.

JOANNE: It’s very specific.

ED: Well, the fact is it’s A, hard to make sense of, and B, a lot of people feel like they skip it over winter break or between volume one and volume two of their textbook. Because the fact is Reconstruction is this pivotal moment that’s kind of blurry in our historical imagination. But here are the two things that it did. It reunified the United States after the rupture of the American Civil War, and it tried to remake the South after the destruction of slavery.

Two enormously important and enormously hard things to do. So there’s a lot at stake in this moment of history, and to get us started about what was at stake I want you to listen to this letter written by a group of free black men in Nashville, Tennessee. And they wrote this in January, 1865, a few months before the end of the Civil War.

MALE SPEAKER: We, the undersigned petitioners, American citizens of African descent, do most respectfully ask a patient hearing of your honorable body in regard to a matter deeply affecting the future condition of our unfortunate and long-suffering race.

NATHAN: Ed, who’s this letter for? It’s a petition, but I’m not entirely sure who they’re petitioning.

ED: Yeah, good question, Nathan. They’re writing to the delegates of a state convention in Nashville who are gathering to decide how Tennessee will rejoin the Union. How do you put the country back together after it’s been taken apart? They’re really trying to figure out what’s it going to mean to be a part of the United States as an equal citizen.

So they want to know if when Tennessee rejoins the Union, will African-Americans be able to vote, or own property, or testify in court? Will they be granted all the rights and privileges and protections of citizenships that they’ve seen their white neighbors enjoying for decades? Because up to this point, these men had seen very little of what America had to offer that was good. They’re not certain at all what the future is going to look like.

MALE SPEAKER: If this order of things continue, our people are destined to a malignant persecution at the hands of rebels and their former rebellious masters whose hatred they may have incurred without precedent even in the South. A rebel may murder his former slave and defy justice. Is this the fruit of freedom and the reward of our services in the field?

Is it for this that we have guided Union officers and soldiers when escaping from the cruel and deadly prisons of the South at the risk of our own lives for we knew, that to us, detection would be death. If this should be so, then will our last state be worse than our first, and we can look for no relief on this side of the grave?

ED: What’s scary about this is that they’re foreseeing the next century.

NATHAN: Yeah, man.

ED: They recognize where all of the bastions of power of the former confederates are going to lie. And they’re telling white Republicans even before the war is over, gentlemen this is what you’re going to have to fix.

JOANNE: And just the existence of this is such a great reminder that, I think, it’s natural to assume that when a war ends, somehow lines have been drawn and things are clear. And this petition is a great reminder that wars end and actually things are extremely unsettled. And things like insider and outsider, and right and wrong, and winners and losers have to be hashed out. And this is a document of hashing out.

ED: Exactly, Joanne. And that hashing out is what Reconstruction is all about. These African-American men are asking whether the federal government will protect them and ensure their rights. Because in January of 1865, it’s not clear what the federal government will do.

NATHAN: So it might be safe to say that never before and really never since has a country been in such need of being rebuilt politically, economically, culturally as during the era of Reconstruction.

ED: Yeah, and I think that’s one of the things that makes this Reconstruction era so poignant. It’s as close to a reboot as we’ve ever had a chance for in American history. We wrote this Constitution that did an elaborate dance around slavery, and then we lived with it for generations until the war tore it apart.

We made all these compromises. But finally, here’s a chance to create a nation without slavery. What a tantalizing possibility. How many countries get a chance to re-imagine themselves?

JOANNE: As someone who works on the founding, the thing about these kinds of rebooting moments, they’re moments of amazing promise. But for that very reason, they’re also moments of tremendous instability and actually fear.

ED: Yeah, you know that promise and that fear are played out in communities all across the South. And what we’re going to do today is to visit two of those communities– one, Washington DC, the other, rural Louisiana– to see what this might look like in people’s lives.