Americans remember the Civil War, but we are less likely to recall its aftermath: Reconstruction. Reconstruction was the nation’s attempt to answer unprecedented questions: Was the Confederacy an attempt to overthrow the U.S. government or just a minor rebellion that should be forgiven? Should its leaders be hanged or forgiven and welcomed home as wayward brothers? Would the federal government insist on equal rights for newly free Black people? What did the nation owe to formerly enslaved people who had never been paid for their labor?
The answers that the U.S. government gave — or failed to give — have shaped the nation that we inherited.
So how is Lexington connected to this crucial turning point in our history?
Lexington-born Theodore Parker converted many to the cause of anti-slavery, including Lexington’s brave anti-slavery activists. His words influenced Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. But he died in 1860, and Lexington’s strongest voice for racial justice was not heard in the post-war Reconstruction period.
The great anti-slavery orator Frederick Douglass, recently self-emancipated from slavery in Maryland, came to the April 1842 annual meeting of the Middlesex Anti-slavery Society that met in Lexington’s Teacher Training Normal School (now the Masons’ Hall on the Green). Douglass considered Lexington a sacred place that stood for liberty for all. Prominent Lexington women associated with the Stone Building, notably Julia Robbins Barrett, Eliza Follen, and Ellen Robbins Stone, raised money and held meetings for the anti-slavery cause. As early as 1842, Lexington voices called for the South — where racial slavery still existed — to be separated from the North, where slavery had been made illegal. Human enslavement shocked the conscience of Lexington’s anti-slavery reformers.
Despite this local abolition movement, many Massachusetts residents and their churches were pro-slavery up until 1861 because the state’s prosperity depended on the cotton trade, textile mills, shipbuilding, insurance, banking and other businesses that were deeply tied to the slavery economy. Then, with Lincoln’s election, southern states began seceding, culminating in the attack on Fort Sumter, which marked the start of the Civil War.
The fighting was long and bloody. The Confederate rebels won early battles. Lexington sent recruits to fight for the Union. Frederick Douglass urged President Lincoln to free the enslaved people and to accept Black soldiers into the Union army. Lincoln finally acted. Lexington’s anti-slavery schoolmaster Dio Lewis celebrated the Emancipation Proclamation with other Massachusetts abolitionists at a giant meeting in Boston. In fact, before the Emancipation Proclamation, many enslaved people had already freed themselves by the end of the war by walking away from plantations. Had the Confederacy won the Civil War, would slavery have returned to Lexington?
Who would finally win the war for the Union? Black troops, President Lincoln said, had made a Union victory possible. 178,975 Black soldiers had gone to war as Union soldiers, and many more aided the Union cause. Medical care sometimes came in segregated units or not at all. In the war-torn nation people who had once been enslaved hoped to reunite their families who had been sold away from them. Teaching enslaved people to read had been made illegal in most of the South, so newly free people wanted an education and a chance to earn a living. Hunger and dislocation affected Black and white alike in the former war zones.
As the nation moved into the Reconstruction era, critical questions emerged. Would the federal government insist on equal rights and offer emergency help to all who suffered? Would equal voting rights be upheld in North and South?
Walking through downtown Lexington during and after the Civil War, you might have encountered famous anti-slavery activists Theodore Weld, Angelina Grimke Weld, and Sarah Grimke (they taught in Dio Lewis’ Female Academy located where CVS is now). The Weld-Grimkes could tell you that the old alliances between the anti-slavery and woman suffrage movements were splitting apart as Reconstruction politicians debated whether all citizens should get the vote or just white and Black men. Reconstruction pitted allies who had risked their lives for abolition and women’s suffrage against each other.
What would anti-slavery luminaries Wendell Phillips, William Lloyd Garrison, Parker Pillsbury, Lucy Stone, and Black leaders Frederick Douglass and Charles Remond, do now that slavery was ended? Once the leader of the most radical anti-slavery reformers, aging and irascible Garrison declared victory over slavery and quit the cause, forgetting that his Black allies had saved his life from lynch mobs. Parker Pillsbury and other friends of the Stone Building’s Robbins-Stone family wondered — what can Lexington do to promote civil rights for Blacks and women?
When the 15th Amendment was proposed in Congress, granting Black men the vote but denying the franchise to ALL women, abolitionist-suffragists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony were outraged and abandoned their Black allies. Lucy Stone, one of the era’s leading suffragists, recognized that Reconstruction was a time to make racial justice the first national priority, and she allied herself with Black leaders Frederick Douglass, Charles Remond, and Lewis Hayden who knew that the deep racism of the country would require a long, difficult struggle.
Which side would Ellen Robbins Stone and Julia Robbins Barrett of the Stone Building family choose? Would the Weld-Grimkes and the other feminist-anti-slavery teachers at Dio Lewis’ Female Academy side with Lucy Stone and Black leaders? Would Lexingtonians aid the thousands of formerly enslaved citizens who struggled to build new lives?
What were the losses and gains of Reconstruction as 30,000 Union soldiers arrived home with an empty-sleeve, missing an arm or a leg?
To delve deeper into this critical era, Dr. Robert Bellinger is going to be speaking about Reconstruction on October 17 at 7 PM, at Follen church 755 Massachusetts Ave. His talk, hosted by the Associated Black Citizens of Lexington and the Lexington Lyceum Advocates, is called “Reconstruction and the Moral Sense of the Nation.” A community reception will follow Dr. Bellinger’s talk.
Dr. Robert Bellinger is a public historian who has worked with many groups in Lexington and Concord to help the public enjoy and understand local history and national history. He has written Lexington’s most comprehensive study of its Black history up to the ante-bellum period, sponsored by the Lexington Historical Society; he has worked with LexSeeHer on its research for the monument, and he has worked on programs and research for the Associated Black Citizens of Lexington and the Historical Programming and Research Committee of the Lexington Lyceum Advocates.
Though tickets will be available at the door, it helps planning for the reception if you get tickets ahead of time. This event is free to students and teachers.
All are welcome and it’s going to be an important time to talk about voter suppression and democracy and what it meant at the end of the Civil War and what it means today.
For tickets:
https://www.facebook.com/events/s/reconstruction-and-the-moral-s/848794510715798/
Kathleen Dalton is the author Theodore Roosevelt: A Strenuous Life (Knopf, 2002)