Aaron Sheehan-Dean
speaker
924 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2026
last heard 24 Aug
Aaron Sheehan-Dean’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
I mean, some historians now date reconstruction itself as a process to 1861.
In November of that year, the Sea Islands along the coast of Charleston and Georgia and Jacksonville were captured by the U.S.
Navy.
Hilton Head is probably the most famous of these spots for contemporary listeners.
And the planters on those islands, they were enormously lucrative places growing in something called Long Island or Sea Island cotton.
It's a very long staple cotton.
They immediately fled to the interior and they left behind both enslaved people and all of these plantations and wealth.
And almost immediately, the U.S.
government, mostly through the army, began...
trying to figure out how to recreate a social order in this place with tens of thousands of now freed people living on this very valuable land.
So during the course of the war, Northerners are thinking about this, but there is also, I think, by the end of the war, a sense that Confederates were both fatigued and also willing to rejoin the Union.
And there is a widespread assumption that Reconstruction will not be difficult.
because Southerners have been beaten so thoroughly and the US, that is American, victory is so clear that they will return and sort of make themselves into good citizens.
And instead, what they confront is a very truculent and angry white South.
And this is already visible in the middle of 1865.
And Andrew Johnson is quite generous with those mostly ex-Confederates who are angry and disaffected and by no means eager to endorse
a genuine social equality or political equality of the sort that certainly the radicals in the North were already imagining by the middle of 1865.
So it's not really till 1866, and it's really the riots in Memphis and in New Orleans in that year.
These are white on black riots.
These are mobilizations of white, usually ex-Confederate soldiers, against the political mobilization of black people.
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