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The Life and Death of Gus Reed - A Story of Race and Justice in Illinois during the Civil War and Reconstruction (Paperback)
Loot Price: R1,321
Discovery Miles 13 210
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The Life and Death of Gus Reed - A Story of Race and Justice in Illinois during the Civil War and Reconstruction (Paperback)
Series: Series on Law, Society, and Politics in the Midwest
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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"Much of Reed's biography remains conjectural, but Bahde does an
excellent job of constructing the series of contextual landscapes
that support his conjectures...The Life and Death of Gus Reed
contributes to the vein of recent historical scholarship that
widens the geographic compass of Reconstruction beyond the South
and lengthens its chronological scope beyond 1877. In emphasizing
the unsettled state of race relations in the North as well as the
South during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, this
historiography performs a valuable service." -American Historical
ReviewGus Reed was a freed slave who traveled north as Sherman's
March was sweeping through Georgia in 1864. His journey ended in
Springfield, Illinois, a city undergoing fundamental changes as its
white citizens struggled to understand the political, legal, and
cultural consequences of emancipation and black citizenship. Reed
became known as a petty thief, appearing time and again in the
records of the state's courts and prisons. In late 1877, he
burglarized the home of a well-known Springfield attorney-and
brother of Abraham Lincoln's former law partner-a crime for which
he was convicted and sentenced to the Illinois State Penitentiary.
Reed died at the penitentiary in 1878, shackled to the door of his
cell for days with a gag strapped in his mouth. An investigation
established that two guards were responsible for the prisoner's
death, but neither they nor the prison warden suffered any penalty.
The guards were dismissed, the investigation was closed, and Reed
was forgotten. Gus Reed's story connects the political and legal
cultures of white supremacy, black migration and black communities,
the Midwest's experience with the Civil War and Reconstruction, and
the resurgence of nationwide opposition to African American civil
rights in the late nineteenth century. These experiences shaped a
nation with deep and unresolved misgivings about race, as well as
distinctive and conflicting ideas about justice and how to achieve
it.
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