Excerpt from The History of North America, Vol. 16
Reconstruction is the name given to the decade following the Civil War. In most minds the word associates itself with one dominant act, - the elevation of the negro race, in America, to civil and political equality with the white race. This change was a revolution in thought and in government: it came suddenly, imperiously and irrevocably. If by an act of thought one could eliminate the negro race from American history, it would be impossible to conceive of a period of "reconstruction" in the order of events on this continent.
Reconstruction thus taking its meaning from the presence of the negro race in America, and from the relation of that race to the white race, it follows that the history of reconstruction coincides with the course of events which determined the relation between the two races.
So long as slavery continued in America, the amelioration of the condition of the negro was individual and exceptional, - not general and regular. Many restrictions, other than those inseparable from a state of slavery, limited the extension of the suffrage to the negro. Even in free States in which it was legally possible, as in New York before 1868, for the negro to become a voter, public sentiment was hostile to the innovation.
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