"The years between 1865 and 1877 form the period in American history known as Reconstruction—reconstruction, in this case, meaning the rebuilding of the federal Union which had been disrupted by the attempt of eleven Southern states to secede from that Union in order to protect legalized slavery. It might have been a new era of "malice toward none, charity for all" in the wake of the Civil War's destructiveness. Instead, Reconstruction is, in practical fact, the bad boy of American history—unwept, unhonored, mostly untaught, and only visible in public awareness as something vaguely awful. It suffers from an absence of the kind of battles-and-leaders material that makes the Civil War so colorful; and it dissipates into a confusing tale of lost opportunities, squalid victories, and embarrassing defeats.
We're not even sure why we call it Reconstruction. After all, to re‑construct the Union carries the faint hint that at some point the original Union needed to be de-constructed and would be reassembled according to a newer plan than the one laid out in the Constitution—which is exactly what Abraham Lincoln thought he was opposing. Lincoln had always insisted that the Southern states never had the constitutional authority to withdraw from the Union in the first place, and therefore had never legally left the Union. No wonder Lincoln disliked the term Reconstruction and used it grudgingly, referring to it as "what is called reconstruction" or "a plan of reconstruction (as the phrase goes)." He preferred to speak of the "re-inauguration of the national authority" or the need to "re-inaugurate loyal state governments."1
Popular culture has only made matters more confusing. Epic movies like Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind frankly endorsed the bleakest view of Reconstruction, which also happened to be the view of embittered Lost Cause Southerners who believed that they had fought honorably and lost honorably, only to be treated to a dishonorable, oppressive, and incompetent peace. Reconstruction, said Confederate army veteran Leigh Robinson, was "not peace established in power, but captured in shame; not throned on high by willing witnesses, but pinned to the earth by imperial steel—the peace of the bayonet."…"
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Armand
completes his initial Union force in 1:72nd scale.
