Abstract
The decade of Reconstruction that followed the American Civil War, was among other things a confrontation between two opposing visions of who were to be included within the scope of American citizenship—the notion of ‘we the people’ enshrined in the declaration and constitution. While a vocal minority of Radcial Republicans from (mostly) the North sought a nationally guaranteed citizenship that was to extend to the recently free black population, Southern whites sought to define citizenship more narrowly in ethno-racial terms. Using a combination of targeted political violence and a superficially race-neutral rhetoric that derived from an established tradition of localism and self-rule, the Southern vision succeed in displacing the more inclusive promise that Reconstruction briefly offered.
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de Vries, M.L. (2019). ‘… a Wretched, Down Trodden and Impoverished People.’ Terrorism, Propaganda, and the Failure of Democracy in Post-Civil War Louisiana . In: Augusteijn, J., Hijzen, C., de Vries, M. (eds) Historical Perspectives on Democracies and their Adversaries. Palgrave Studies in Political History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20123-4_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20123-4_2
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