An imaginative construction of Reconstruction
by Andrew Seguin
 The study of history is often erroneously depicted as the mere gathering of facts, dates and names, when what it most requires is an active imagination. One has to truly envision the past to better understand it.
Teacher Carolyn Scott obviously grasps this. She recently asked her Class 7 students, who have been studying the Civil War, “If you were president in 1865, what would you do to reconstruct the nation?”
Imagining themselves in Abraham Lincoln’s or Andrew Johnson’s shoes, the girls wrote out their plans, which were informed by their readings and discussions about the Civil War. They shared them with Ms. Scott and one another, engendering a lively discussion about which policies might revive the United States and which might not.
“I would not punish the South,” one student began. “I would open a lot of factories to provide jobs for freedmen. Blacks and whites would have equal rights to vote,” she continued.
High on every student’s list was providing monetary aid to freedmen, as were the introduction of racial equality and having the North help rebuild destroyed Southern cities. Some students thought that former slave plantations could provide housing and paid work for freedmen, while others suggested that the plantations be divided up and given out to freedmen to farm on their own.
The question of how to finance the reconstruction lingered. “I thought we could increase taxes, but over half the people [in the country] couldn’t pay them,” a student remarked. Other students recommended raising tariffs, and Ms. Scott introduced the idea of workers being paid in cotton, for example, when it was harvest time.
As their studies continue, the girls will learn which of their ideas were adopted by the U.S. government and which weren’t feasible. Though they’ll discover that there was no panacea for the country, Ms. Scott’s assignment gave them the opportunity to at least imagine one.
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