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The Trouble They Seen: Black People Tell the Story of Reconstruction

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It is only fitting, now that headlines are featuring those who would honor people who tried to split the country asunder, that we take a look back at the true impact of slavery upon Americans.

"The Trouble They Seen: Black People Tell the Story of Reconstruction," is a heartbreaking story about the very human damage to those cut loose, at the end of the Civil War, and the failure of the United States to live up to its promises to that freed population.

Accounts of outright murders of freed blacks who refused to carry passes when they traveled, or call plantation owners master, or tried to find their families, were recorded in the months that immediately followed the end of the war. And as the white population gradually realized that no harm would come to them for defying federal law, the crimes worsened until whatever limitations had been put on secessionists were abandoned and white rule reasserted. In the process, all interest in justice for the former slaves was lost and somehow, the secessionists managed to get themselves portrayed as victims, their "Lost Cause" a noble one.

Reconstruction may have been the law, and there were certainly some successes for a short length of time, but reality was often another matter. Story after story tells of freedmen having to relinquish land they had just been granted, despite, as they point out, the fact that they had remained loyal while their white owners most assuredly had not.

Most wrenching, though, are the ads appearing in black newspapers, appealing for help finding relatives who had sold off earlier. "I have a mother somewhere in the world. I know not where," reads one note from a Missouri pastor.

"Richmond feels highly flattered by the visits of so many excursion parties. On the 3rd of July a large company arrived from Georgia to search out relatives and friends from whom they had been separated by the cruel necessities of slavery. Aged women and grayhaired men journeyed into Virginia from far-off Georgia, hoping to hear some word, to perchance, to meet sons and daughters whom the had bade farewell at the auction block. Many had the good fortune to find those they sought and their greetings were pathetic beyond description," went another account. Of course, their searches were hindered by the fact that the slaves' names had frequently changed each time they'd been sold.

Nearly all the material is drawn from contemporary accounts and so rings with truth and a sense of justice denied.

The late Dorothy Sterling devoted much of her writing career to black issues, though she was white. And that reminds us that the history of black people is also a history of the United States, not something to be segregated or ignored by the larger group. It belongs to all of us.