How Robert E. Lee and Booker T. Washington Became Educators Dedicated to Rebuilding a War-Torn America

How Robert E. Lee and Booker T. Washington Became Educators Dedicated to Rebuilding a War-Torn America
A history class in session at the Tuskegee Institute, 1902. Public Domain
Jeff Minick
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If we slip back in time to the late 1860s, we find an America torn apart by war and suffering.

In the spring of 1865, the North had defeated the Southern Confederacy. Less than a week after Confederate forces surrendered at Appomattox, Abraham Lincoln, whose policies might have changed the course of American history following that defeat, lay dead, a victim of assassination. The Radical Republicans in Congress were now calling the shots and were intent on breaking what remained of the governments of the South, pushing for Republicans and blacks to take over state legislatures. Meanwhile, the war had torn apart the South’s infrastructure. The plantation system was erased, at least for the time being, and the railroads were wrecked. Many industries, such as they were, had either closed their doors or were in ruins.

Jeff Minick
Jeff Minick
Author
Jeff Minick has four children and a growing platoon of grandchildren. For 20 years, he taught history, literature, and Latin to seminars of homeschooling students in Asheville, N.C. He is the author of two novels, “Amanda Bell” and “Dust on Their Wings,” and two works of nonfiction, “Learning as I Go” and “Movies Make the Man.” Today, he lives and writes in Front Royal, Va.
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