America's Reconstruction as Revolution

The first 200 words of this essay...

America's Reconstruction as Revolution

November 28, 2007

There are many reasons one may describe the Reconstruction era as America's unfinished revolution. It was a time that promised great change and progress, not only in the Southern United States, but across the entire country, and many of these changes were realized, if only for a short time. But it is not sensible to assume that the age after the progress had been reverted was the same as the antebellum South or even of the South before Reconstruction began. Though the Republican reformations did not stick, the South, and America, after Reconstruction was a new place. It operated on different systems with different ideals.

A logical place to view as the beginning of Reconstruction is the first of January, 1863. This is the day that President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. Lincoln was able to make such a declaration because the nation was at war, and as Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy, he could make military orders. Because of the logistics of the position, Lincoln could not free all slaves. He could only free slaves in the areas that had seceded from the union and