Theme Of Forever Free

During the 1800’s, the United States faced one of the biggest threats to their nation to this day. Opposing views of slavery drew a wedge between the countries’ Northern and Southern societies, leading to the Civil War, emancipation of all slaves, and an attempt at reconstructing the broken nation. In the novel Forever Free by Eric Foner, he does a great job at exposing the sad truths of this era. Foner begins by discussing the events that led up to the Civil War in 1861, while emphasizing the dispute between the North and the South over slavery. The Northern states had all applied for gradual emancipation by the nineteenth century, but on the other hand, the Southern states were not budging. They believed that “slavery was their truth.”

After talking about specific African Americans and their horrid encounters with the Ku Klux Klan, Foner writes, “While most white southerners were law-abiding citizens, they seemed willing to forgive the Klan’s excesses because they shared the organization’s ultimate goal—the overthrow of Reconstruction and the restoration of white supremacy,” (Foner 174). The fact that the Southerners were willing to forgive the KKK after they had killed and tortured hundreds of African Americans is appalling. Also, the quote proves that with so many citizens supporting the overthrow of Reconstruction, there was no chance that it would be successful in the long run because deep down, half of the nation did not care about the rights of African Americans. To add on, the opponents of Reconstruction despised it so much because they viewed it as an era of “Negro rule” as if the Blacks were trying to take over the country when in reality, they were just trying to achieve basic rights and protections from the government. In the epilogue, Foner states that the reason he wrote the novel was to accurately describe the sad truths of this era and to prove wrong the idea that Reconstruction's achievements outweighed its failures. In this it proves that Foner himself thought Reconstruction was a massive

Throughout the book, Foner places much emphasis on the ineffectiveness of the laws during Reconstruction and the repercussions it had on African Americans achieving racial justice. The fourteenth amendment, which was passed by the Senate in 1866 and later ratified in 1868, granted citizenship to anyone born or naturalized in the United States, including African Americans. It also declared that states could not deprive anyone of their life, liberty, or property, and that everyone had equal protection under the law. Surely, one would think that since it was written in the law of the country that it would be practiced, but nonetheless, terrorist organizations like the KKK carelessly disobeyed the amendment and heartlessly tortured African Americans along with white Republicans who supported Reconstruction. Foner shows an example of some of the actions of the KKK when he explains the story of the Colfax massacre, “The bloodiest single act of carnage in Reconstruction took place in Colfax, Louisiana, in 1873, where fifty or more members of a Black militia unit were massacred after surrendering to armed whites…” (Foner 173). This event was not just an act of the KKK, but other Southern whites as well, and it truly represented the violence and mass terrorism of a time that was supposed to show progression in the treatment of