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 over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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American History Hit · Why Did Reconstruction Fail? · 24 Aug 2026 podcast

I mean, they don't, you know, for the most part, these are men who are not very keen on democracy in general.

And there are great efforts during the secession conventions and in the life of the Confederacy to kind of restore power to the elite in a more South Carolina model that is more of an aristocracy than a democracy.

So the idea of of now sharing political power with black southerners, absolutely anathema to white southerners.

And among most of them, there are a handful, you know, some prominent ones and most prominently, of course, James Longstreet, the former Confederate general, Lee's right hand in the war, John Mosby up in Virginia, who find ways to make peace with both the Republican Party and black Southerners and think about a future collectively.

But most white Southerners do not.

control?

So there are really two mechanisms within the South that white Southerners are pursuing, one political and nonviolent and one

violent and extra-political or extra-legal.

The first one is more easily dealt with.

When the constitutional conventions that happen under the auspices of the Reconstruction Acts in the South occur, this is 1867 mostly,

Those are rebuilding, as we talked about a minute ago, genuine biracial democracies in the South.

The first instinct of white Southerners is to basically boycott that altogether.

So in those first elections in 1868, even in 1870, many white Southerners aren't voting.

As it turns out, Northerners regard those elections as legitimate.

So white Southerners are entirely left out of the political order.

They then realize they need to come back in.

And so there's great effort

to recruit white voters, to mobilize white voters.

And the easiest way to do this is with the threat of black domination, as they say.

And this is, of course, never a reality in the sense that there are only two states that are even close to having a black majority population.

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