Welcome to the Hillsdale College Online Courses podcast. I'm Jeremiah Riegan.

And I'm Juan Davalos. We are back with The Great American Story, A Land of Hope. We're turning to lectures 11 and 12 today,

reconstruction and transformation. So we come to the end of the Civil War, and America is,

so to speak, at a crossroads. There's questions of justice that have been answered.

Slavery will be abolished very quickly by constitutional amendment.

If there's another matter of justice, which is how to reconstitute, reintegrate the states

that had rebelled.

There's also other consequences of the war besides the material destruction.

More important, in fact, than the material destruction was the loss of life of 600 to 700,000 men

and the effect that that would have on the character of the nation.

Yeah, I think if I remember correctly, it's about 2% of the population at the time, and therefore

it is the costliest war in American history in terms of lives of Americans lost in any war.

So that is devastating, especially devastating to the south.

The north is not as destroyed after the

war, but the south definitely is. And obviously, it's a great challenge for statesmanship on

how do you reunify the country and then how do you reconstruct it and how do you move forward

into the future?

And this ends up being, you know, later on in century, a time of great transformation in American life.

Lincoln had talked about reconciliation and forgiveness and his second inaugural address and was very interested in reestablishing proper relations between the North and South by treating all

Americans, including Southern Americans, as citizens. And his assassination made that more difficult

because certain politicians in the North were interested in retribution more than forgiveness

and reintegration. And so there were difficulties that occurred after the Civil War

...