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Little Rock citizens greet returning African-American veterans of the Civil War

Image Courtesy of MilitaryHistoryPhotos.com

What is the Second American Revolution, and why does it need defending? The Second American Revolution is the name historians and others use to describe the revolutionary period and events during and after the Civil War in the U.S. that saw the ending of slavery and the overthrow of the slaveowners' rule.

After the war, the former slave states of the Confederacy, after some initial resistance aided by President Andrew Johnson, went through the period known as Reconstruction, which established voting and other rights for male African-Americans. This brought about revolutionary-democratic state governments which were overthrown in their turn and replaced by white regimes whose politicians pushed back against the gains of former slaves and their allies, in a counterrevolution that eventually reversed many of those gains, while failing to reestablish chattel slavery.

During the war, the Democratic party was the instrument of the slaveowners, while the Republicans carried out their party's electoral platform promise to end slavery.

After the war, as Reconstruction gained ground, conservatives of both parties (including former "radicals") fought it with increasing success. Leading Republican business and political figures finally succeeded in tying President Ulysses Grant's hands so he couldn't move against the flagrant murderers of white and black Republicans and others. At the time, the struggle for emancipation and freedmen's rights had a literary dimension, with emancipationists trying hard to tell the truth about what was going on in the Southern states, while racist whites defended secession (and denied that the war was about slavery).

It is a struggle that continues to this day, and this website is part of that fight. Its main weapon in this struggle is a historical novel titled Like Slaves on the Run: A novel of the Civil War and Reconstruction, available by installments on this site for a modest price. To see more about this novel and how to order it, click here with your mouse.

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