US History

While some radioactive elements in nuclear fuel decay quickly, cesium’s half-life is 30 years and strontium’s is 29 years. Scientists estimate that it takes 10 to 13 half-lives before life and economic activity can return to an area. That means that the contaminated area — designated by Ukraine’s Parliament as 15,000 square miles, around the size of Switzerland — will be affected for more than 300 years.

Since the early 1990s, Ukrainian officials have been working on a plan to replace it, finally launching a project called the New Safe Confinement, a 300-foot steel arch that will enclose and seal off the reactor for the next 100 years. Its cost is estimated at $1.4 billion, to be paid largely by donor nations. The project, originally scheduled to be finished in 2005, has been beset by delays and financing shortfalls.

Capitol Men

Dray's

It does not really offer an assessment of Reconstruction's successes and failings

Twelve years earlier, Smalls had piloted the Planter, on which he worked as a slave crewman, out of Charleston harbor and delivered it to the Union navy, a deed that made him a national hero. In 1864, while the ship was undergoing repairs in Philadelphia, a conductor evicted Smalls from a streetcar when he refused to give up his seat to a white passenger. Ninety years before a similar incident involving Rosa Parks sparked the Montgomery bus boycott, Smalls's ordeal inspired a movement of black and white reformers to persuade the Pennsylvania legislature to ban discrimination in public transportation.

Stephens offered a long argument based on states' rights as to why the bill was unconstitutional.

The subject of their exchange was a civil rights bill banning racial discrimination in places of public accommodation.

Elliott launched into a learned and impassioned address explaining why the recently enacted Fourteenth Amendment justified the measure (which was signed into law by President Grant the following year), then reminded Congress of an infamous speech Stephens had delivered on the eve of the Civil War: "It is scarcely twelve years since that gentleman shocked the civilized world by announcing the birth of a government which rested on human slavery as its cornerstone." Elliott already had proved that he refused to be intimidated by whites: in 1869 he whipped a white man in the streets of Columbia for writing inappropriate notes to his wife. A black man assaulting a white man in defense of his wife's good name was not a common occurrence in nineteenth-century South Carolina.

Congressmen Dray profiles came from diverse origins and differed in their approach to public policies. Some had been free before the Civil War, others enslaved

Some favored government action to distribute land to former slaves; others insisted that in a market society the only way to acquire land was to purchase it. Some ran for office as representatives of their race, others as exemplars of the ideal that, with the end of slavery and the advent of legal equality, race no longer mattered. Reconstruction's black Congressmen did not see themselves simply as spokesmen for the black community

was one of the more conservative black leaders; yet in the Senate he spoke out for more humane treatment of Native Americans and opposed legislation banning immigration from China

sixteen black members of Congress

had enjoyed opportunities and advantages unknown to most African-Americans

had been born free in North Carolina

was the slave son of his owner and was educated by the same tutor who taught his white half-siblings.

Some Congressmen had enjoyed unique privileges as slaves.

wner allowed him to learn to read and write and to run a hotel and livery stable in Selma

Others, however, had experienced slavery in all its brutality.

Jeremiah Haralson

None of these men fit the old stereotype of Reconstruction officials as ignorant, incompetent and corrupt.

All were literate, most were seasoned political organizers by the time of their election and nearly all were honest.

ne who does fit the image of venality wa

of Louisiana, whose career combined staunch advocacy of civil rights with a sharp eye for opportunities to line his pockets

Pinchback grew up and attended school in Cincinnati. In the 1850s he worked as a cabin boy on an Ohio River steamboat. He fell in with a group of riverboat gamblers and learned their trade. He turned up in New Orleans in 1862 and expertly navigated the byzantine world of Louisiana's Reconstruction politics. Pinchback was undoubtedly corrupt (he accumulated a small fortune while in office) but also an accomplished politician.

Reconstruction ended in 1877, when President Rutherford B. Hayes abandoned the idea of federal intervention to protect the rights of black citizens in the South, essentially leaving their fate in the hands of local whites.

black political power, while substantially diminished, did not vanish until around 1900, when the Southern states disenfranchised black voters. Six more African-Americans served in Congress before the end of the nineteenth century. Some of their Reconstruction predecessors remained active in politics

of Planter fame, served as customs collector at Beaufort until 1913, when he was removed as part of a purge of blacks from the federal bureaucracy by Woodrow Wilson, the first Southern-born president since Reconstruction.

Pinchback and Bruce moved to Washington, where they became leaders of the city's black elite and arbiters of federal patronage appointments for African-Americans. Bruce worked tirelessly but unsuccessfully to persuade Congress to reimburse blacks who had deposited money in the Freedman's Savings Bank, which failed during the Panic of 1873. Like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in our own time, the bank was a private corporation chartered by Congress that enjoyed the implicit but not statutory backing of the federal government. Its counterparts today are being bailed out with billions of taxpayer dollars, as they have been deemed too big to fail. The Freedman's Savings Bank was too black to rescue.

The last black Congressman of the post-Reconstruction era wa

of North Carolina, whose term ended in 1901. From then until 1929, when

took his seat representing Chicago, Congress remained lily-white. Not until 1972, with

election in Georgia and

in Texas, did black representation resume from states that had experienced Reconstruction. Today the Congressional Black Caucus numbers forty-two members, seventeen of them from the states of the old Confederacy.

One such episode involves

who in 1874 was elected to Congress from Beaufort County, South Carolina.

Equally riveting is the 1874 confrontation between

he former vice president of the Confederacy, then representing Georgia in the House of Representatives, and another black South Carolinian,

Robert Brown Elliott (1842-1884) was an African American member of the United States House of Representatives from South Carolina. Robert Brown Elliott's early life is a mystery. Although he claimed to have been born in Liverpool, England to West Indian immigrants, and to have graduated from Eton College, biographers have been unable to corroborate these facts. He moved to South Carolina in 1867 and established a law practice. Elliott helped organize the local Republican Party and served in the state constitutional convention. In 1868 he was elected to the South Carolina House of Representatives. The next year he was appointed assistant adjutant-general; he was the first African American commanding general of the South Carolina National Guard. As part of his job, he helped form a state militia to fight the Ku Klux Klan. Elliott was elected as a Republican to the Forty-second and Forty-third United States Congress. He "delivered a celebrated speech" in favor of the Civil Rights Act of 1875.[1] He resigned on November 1, 1874, to fight political corruption in South Carolina. He served again in the South Carolina House of Representatives, where he was elected as Speaker of the House. He ran unsuccessfully for South Carolina Attorney General in 1876. Reconstruction ended that year and he was forced out of office.[] He set up a private law practice in New Orleans.

It would, however, be rash hence to infer, that immediate and unconditional emancipation works better than the gradual and conditioned abolition of slavery.

In studying these precedents it must be re- membered that the slaves in our Southern States are at least ten times as numerous as the slaves in either the British or the French colonies.

t is pretty well understood that President Lincoln agrees with Senator Doolittle in advo- cating colonization of the blacks

Those who have read “Sewell's Or- deal of Free Labor in the British West Indies,” will understand this prejudice. In Jamaica and Barbados the mulattoes are steadily gaining pow- er and influence, and the end can not be mis- taken. The white race must eventually go to the wall. To avoid this result, Mr. Lincoln, Mr. Doolittle, Mr. Blair, and those who agree with them, propose to colonize the negroes of our Southern States—to send them to Hayti, or Cen- tral America, or somewhere else.

To be effectual this remedy must be thorough. The entire four millions must be exported.