Episodes Around: 18701026

  1. Reconstruction and the Ku Klux Klan
    date February 12, 1869 to 1870map SUMTER, Georgiatags African-Americans, Government, Law, Politics, Race-Relations

    Reverend Hamilton W. Pierson traveled throughout the antebellum South as a member of the American Bible Society. In the years following the war, however, he settled down in Andersonville, Georgia, and sought to spread political voice to freedmen. His intentions were motivated by a humanitarian desire to assist the freedmen adjust to their new lives. His efforts at ensuring the enfranchisement of...

  2. The classic walls of The Dear Old Mary Sharpe College
    date January, 1870 to March 12, 1871map HARDEMAN, Tennesseetags Education, Women

    After two years of silence, Fannie Irene Jones wrote about her evolution from a little child of eleven longing for the shades of the classic walls of the dear old Mary Sharpe, to a college girl whose brightest hope as been realized. Unlike the stereotypical image of the upper class southern belle isolated on a large plantation, Fannie studied Latin and Greek every day until she could leave the...

  3. Calvinism in middle Tennessee
    date 1870 to May 20, 1871map HARDEMAN, Tennesseetags Church/Religious-Activity

    John Houston Bills never attended the same church on Sunday. Even in his early seventies, he had the mobility to travel all over the county to the Episcopal, Baptist, Evangelical Christian, and Presbyterian churches. Maybe he enjoyed hearing different preachers and different Christian perspectives, but church also served a social function for him. Bills was a successful businessman, planter, and...

  4. White Power and Black Wage Labor
    date 1870map GLYNN, Georgiatags African-Americans, Agriculture, Race-Relations

    Francis Leigh Butler ran her plantation on her own. As a white woman, she earned respect from her neighbors for her abilities to oversee the completion of day-to-day work done by her hired black laborers. Butler considered the hired hands to be loyal workers-almost a part of her family. To her dismay, she overheard that one of the men, Peter Track, who had been a favorite had tried to leave the...

  5. Welcome to West Virginia
    date 1870map WOOD, West Virginiatags Agriculture, Economy, Migration/Transportation

    Seven years after its creation, West Virginia continued to be less populated than its older, more widely settled eastern counterpart. According to the Encyclopedia of the South, at the end of the Civil War West Virginia was an undeveloped and rural state with a population of only about 400,000, or about one-third that of contemporary Virginia. In part to attempt to counteract this imbalance, as...

  6. Martial Law Declared in North Carolina
    date June 8, 1870 to November 10, 1870map CASWELL, North Carolinatags Crime/Violence, Race-Relations, War

    The Ku Klux Klan began its attempts to undermine the formulating North Carolina state government in 1868. Their attempts to destroy Reconstruction efforts and institute white supremacy created a state of lawlessness and violence in the state of North Carolina. It was pattern that followed the Ku Klux Klan throughout the South. In this the heyday of the Klan, it found support even in the highest...

  7. Chinese Workers Arrive in Iberville Parish, Louisiana
    date October 26, 1870map IBERVILLE, Louisianatags African-Americans, Agriculture, Economy, Race-Relations

    The Chinese workers were wide-eyed with anticipation when they arrived at Edward Gay's St. Louis plantation in Iberville Parish, Louisiana on October 26, 1870. The welcome that the workers recruited from California received when they stepped foot on the rich white Gay family's land was far from hospitable. Moon-Ho Jung's Coolies and Cane frankly describes the scene: Gay's...