What did Northerners think about black civil rights during Reconstruction?
David Blight: There wasn’t necessarily a clear consensus about what Reconstruction policy ought to be, and there certainly wasn’t yet a consensus about the extent of liberty and civil rights for the freedmen. But there was a fierce need or desire among white Northerners at the end of the Civil War to preserve what they had suffered and died for. And it has a great deal to do with why, for at least a short period of time, the radical Republican vision of Reconstruction did manage enough support to sustain it, at least through the restoration of the Southern states between 1868 and 1870. Of course, like in all eras of American political history, Americans are also during the early Reconstruction years responding to events. For example, in 1866, only a year after the war had ended, some terrible riots occurred in the South, namely in Memphis and New Orleans, which were essentially massacres conducted against black communities… where it was clear to anyone who looked that if some kind of
