Chapter 17 - The South in Reconstruction

Summary

Reconstruction is the term traditionally used to designate the period and process by which the defeated Southern states were reintegrated into the United States after the U.S. Civil War. Sidney Lanier was quite willing to use poetry to express his pain and anger at the way the white South was being treated in Reconstruction. Lanier's racial logic begins by establishing that poetry is to be understood as music rather than language. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's effort to speak on behalf of black people extended back before the Civil War, when she agitated in favor of freedom for African American slaves. According to Harper, race, as an operative distinction between black and white peoples, should give way to a shared American national identity. Current scholarship continues to emphasize the role of race in nineteenth century American literary culture and to seek for previously neglected voices.