Historical Fiction: 2 - the Civil War and Reconstruction

April 6, 1873

          I couldn't believe it when John brought this dusty old journal home after returning from one of his business trips out to the Eastern Seaborg. But he has left again so I find myself sneakily writing an entry. 

          I am so happy that our family was spared during the civil war; living up in the North does have its advantages. However, even after the war I stay worried. As a mother of two I am often visiting our local market for food, and today I overheard the most troubling news. It has been all the rage in Harper's Weekly as seen in Thomas Nast's cartoons, but black suffrage is getting quite a beating from confederate southerners. They fight so hard to keep blacks from voting that in some states southerners have even created a poll tax, forcing people to pay to vote, and a literacy test, allowing only those who pass to vote. These two methods in my eyes are ludicrous attempts of not allowing change in power in the South. They have even established Jim Crow segregation of public facilities like churches and schools to keep blacks from gaining power. 

          Also concerning black suffrage, the Ku Klux Klan is something's I've heard much about. Killing blacks and those radical republicans that protect them, it's horrifying how such murderers can be the talk of early morning shoppers. I'll let you know that my cousin Henry was recently killed by those monsters, and I will never forgive them! Not that they are the only extremist group around, but they are most surely the one that scares me the most. 

          Because republicanism runs in my family's blood, I can say that the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments got me very exited. For the first time there is the possibility of equality among whites and blacks with the abolishment of slavery, and gaining of citizenship and voting rights for blacks in the eyes of the law. I personally believe, as I've recently seen, that equality between whites and blacks on a social level will be hard fought. Only yesterday did a large white woman threaten a black mother of being a muddy poor mark on society and demand that she move South to become a sharecropper. 

          I've heard that the southern sharecroppers are in deep debt to their landowners. They're like slaves, not able to move on, trapped in an endless cycle of work without almost any monetary reward. The numerous factories that are currently popping up in the South would be a much better place to work. 

          I'm sorry, my son Jeremy just came in the front door from school. I have to prepaid dinner, but perhaps I could ask him if he's heard anything new about current politics from his studies today.