Freedoms Gained and Lost

Adam H. Domby (Edited By) Adam Domby is an Associate Professor of History at Auburn University, having previously worked at the College of Charleston. He is the author of The False Cause: Fraud, Fabrication, and White Supremacy in Confederate Memory. In 2018, he won the John T. Hubble Prize for the best article in Civil War History. He received his PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Simon Lewis (Edited By) Simon Lewis has been teaching African and Third World Literature at the College of Charleston since 1996. A former long-time director of the Carolina Lowcountry and Atlantic World (CLAW) program at the College, Dr. Lewis is the coeditor of three volumes of essays in USC Press’s Carolina Lowcountry and Atlantic World series: The Fruits of Exile: Central European Intellectual Immigration to America in the Age of Fascism, Ambiguous Anniversary: The Bicentennial of the International Slave Trade Bans, and The Civil War as Global Conflict: Transnational Meanings of the American Civil War. He is also the author of two monographs on African literature and numerous refereed articles primarily on South African writers. He was recognized in 2021 with a Governor’s Award in the Humanities from South Carolina.

Introduction

Simon Lewis and Adam H. Domby | 1

Whom Is Reconstruction For?

Bruce E. Baker | 17

Implementing Public Schools: Competing Visions and Crises in Postemancipation Mobile, Alabama

Hilary N. Green | 39

Reconstruction Justice: African American Police Officers in Charleston and New Orleans

Samuel Watts | 57

1874: Self-Defense and Racial Empowerment in the Alabama Black Belt

Michael W. Fitzgerald | 78

“They Mustered a Whole Company of Kuklux as Militia”:

State Violence and Black Freedoms in Kentucky’s Readjustment

Shannon M. Smith | 96

A Woman of “Weak Mind”: Gender, Race, and Mental Competency in the Reconstruction Era

Felicity Turner | 121

Idealism versus Material Realities: Economic Woes for Northern African American Families

Holly A. Pinheiro, Jr. | 143

“Works Meet for Repentance”: Congressional Amnesty and Reconstructed Rebels

Brian K. Fennessy | 159

Toward an International History of Reconstruction

Don H. Doyle | 181

The Dream of a Rural Democracy:

US Reconstruction and Abolitionist Propaganda in Rio de Janeiro, 1880–1890

Sergio Pinto-Handler | 212

Lessons from “Redemption”: Memories of Reconstruction Violence in Colonial Policy

Adam H. Domby | 232

Remembering War, Constructing Race Pride, Promoting Uplift:

Joseph T. Wilson and the Black Politics of Reconstruction and Retreat

Matthew E. Stanley | 249

Fact, Fancy, and Nat Fuller’s Feast in 1865 and 2015

Ethan J. Kytle | 276

Acknowledgments | 305

List of Contributors | 307

Index | 309