American Experience - Reconstruction: The Second Civil War
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DVD details
Brand: ParamountDVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language)
Format: Black & White, Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, NTSC, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.78:1
Running Time: 175 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2005-02-08
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: PBS
DVD Reviews of American Experience - Reconstruction: The Second Civil War
DVD Review: The South loses the Civil War but wins Reconstruction,
Summary: 4 Stars
If there is a villain behind the curtain of the tragic story of Reconstruction, then that would have to be John Wilkes Booth. "Reconstruction: The Second Civil War" basically begins with Lincoln's assassination, but the harm that Booth unleashed on the South by removing the compassionate Lincoln from the political stage and empowering the Radical Republicans in Congress to appease their demands for Southern subjugation is a profound irony. Still, if there is a clear lesson from this "American Experience" documentary, it is that the South might have lost the Civil War but they managed to win Reconstruction.
This two-part PBS documentary covers the momentous years 1863 to 1877. Part I, "Revolution" produced and directed by Llewellyn M. Smith, begins with Lincoln's warning that Reconstruction would be "fraught with great difficulty," and ends in 1867 when Congress passed the Radical Republican's Reconstruction plan that divided the former Confederacy into five military districts, each commanded by a General with power to enforce law and administer justice. New southern governments would be created but were required to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment and allow black men the right to vote, which saw former slaves running and be elected to public office. Part II, "Retreat," produced and directed by Elizabeth Deane shows how the Democrats slowly but surely took power back in the Southern states and achieved "redemption" for white Southerners. A compelling case is made for the acquiescence of Northerners with the concern of Southern whites for keeping the blacks subordinate, and one of the more interesting episodes concerns the White League, which went after carpetbaggers the way the Ku Klux Klan was going after freedmen (I am surprised I had never heard of the Coushatta massacre before this). When President Grant sends federal troops to take the Louisiana legislature back from a takeover by the White League, it is an intervention that apparently offends Northerners as much as it did Southerners (but an armed mob taking over a state legislature is apparently okay). By the time you get to the end of this documentary you are convinced that the Civil War was a tragedy, but Reconstruction was a farce.
While this documentary covers the history and politics of the period it also focuses on a series of key individuals to tell the story of Reconstruction, much as Ken Burns did in "The Civil War." Marshall Twitchell, a former Yankee officer from Vermont, became a successful "Carpetbagger" in Louisiana who had a violent neighbor in planter B. W. Marston (whose descendant tells his family's side of the story. Fan Butler tried to keep her family's Georgia plantations, which grew rice, afloat through sharecropping. John Roy Lynch was a freed slave who succeeded in politics because of Reconstruction, while Tunis Campbell tried to stop whites from controlling blacks in his county and measured his idealism with provocative efforts that made him a target for trying to give the Negro supremacy over the white man. You can make your own judgment as to how representative these choices are as focal characters, given that they represent both Southern and Northern as well as white and black Americans, but they do allow the history to be personalized as well as setting up the historians being interviewed to speak to the greater significance of their individual stories.
With regards to the impeachment of Andrew Johnson, I would contend that it does not necessarily need to be turned into a question of Reconstruction. Johnson's crime was not that he wanted to fire a member of his cabinet, but rather than he tried to fire a Radical Republican when, you have to remember, he was neither. Abraham Lincoln was not re-elected to the presidency as a Republican, but rather as a member of the "Union" party, with Johnson, a Democrat who was the only U.S. Senator from the South not to resign following secession, as his running mate. The first part of this documentary does a good job of trashing Johnson as racist who even betrayed his allegiance to poor whites over the planters because of his disregard for the freed slaves. By the time Grant takes over the White House from Johnson there is simply too much momentum behind Reconstruction for any chief executive to do anything about it. Even when the Congress passes civil rights legislation it is not enforced as the Democrats regain control of the South and eventually the laws are declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. It would take a century for those rights to be passed again and actually become the law of the land.
Description of American Experience - Reconstruction: The Second Civil War
Spanning the years from 1863-1877 this american experience mini-series tells the story of the tumultuous years after the civil war during which america grappled with how to rebuild itself. Studio: Paramount Home Video Release Date: 02/08/2005 Run time: 175 minutes Rating: NrBestsellers in DVD
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