Browse Exhibits (16 total)

The end of the Civil War brought an era of Reconstruction to North Carolina as well as the rest of the south. The task of Reconstruction involved creating a society in which everyone was equal regardless of race. The struggle between the Republican and Democratic parties made this process difficult. The emergence of white rebellion groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan, made it nearly impossible, especially since Republicans were key targets of Klan violence. Governor William Woods Holden and the Republican Party had the strenous task of suppressing the Klan violence. This task became a political war known as the Kirk-Holden War. Governor Holden carried out the decisions of the Republican Party, and these actions lead to his impeachment and the downfall of the Republican Party in the state. 

The Ku Klux Klan was known to be active in certain parts of North Carolina, but Klan activity and other white supremacist group activity became prominent in many counties of the state in the post-Reconstruction years. Once Union soldiers were no longer occupying the south, white supremacist groups began to dominate the landscape in the south and started a violent campaign to disenfranchise, lynch, and terrorize African Americans. When the Union soldiers left after Reconstruction, suddenly African Americans found themselves in very desperate and dangerous situations, sometimes life was even more tragic and terrifying than the pre-Civil War slavery years. The drastically negative changes that took place in these African American's lives help modern historians understand why and how violence and disenfranchisement protracted the rights, civil liberities, and safety of African Americans in the south until well into the 20th cnetury when the Civil Rights Movement began to gain a foothold in the U.S.

This exhibit explores "the war within" at the sesquicentennial moment in North Carolina, arguing that the Civil War exhibits in the North Carolina Museum of History represented an interpretive ambivalence relating to how North Carolinians have chosen to remember the war over time.  The author argues that three examples in the museum highlight three distinct (and conflicting) threads of Civil War memory--nostalgia, commemoration, and reconciliation.