It was election day in Springfield on April 5, 1870, and tensions were high. What was usually a low-interest election for township officers was anything but typical, not because of the candidates, but because of the voters.
For the first time, Black men were casting a ballot, thanks to the new 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Three days later, the Daily Illinois State Register – the pro-slavery, Democrat Springfield paper – stated profanely: “It was humiliating to the last degree to be compelled to stand back while these new fledged patriots, these colored gentry, this ‘black vomit,’ was poured into the ballot box… Our colored ‘brudders’ must be taught that we have not yet consented to yield the administration of affairs entirely into their hands.” The article ended with a promise to teach the new voters “a lesson.”
It’s a prime example of tensions that brewed during America’s post-Civil War period of Reconstruction, when the country dealt with the repercussions of the war and its racial issues. That response was led by Abraham Lincoln before his assassination but turned upside down by critics afterward.
A new exhibit at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum, “The Second American Revolution,” looks at this era’s competing forces and responses to them through artifacts and media, such as a film about refugee camps for enslaved people seeking freedom and stories of women abolitionists.
The exhibit also looks at the lingering effects of Reconstruction’s failure. ALPLM executive director Christina Shutt says it helps Americans learn from past mistakes.
“It’s important to show the fragility of American democracy, especially as we reflect on 250 years since the Declaration of Independence, because as Shakespeare writes, ‘What’s past is prologue,’ she said. “Everything that has happened in the past has led us to the present moment and the challenges that we’re living through. The question for us becomes, what do we want the next 250 years to be?”
During Reconstruction the country attempted to give Blacks, especially Black men, some of the same rights as white men. Blacks were freed from slavery and given citizenship, and Black men were given the right to vote. It was the promise of a more inclusive democracy, and it worked… for a while.
“Thousands” of African American men were elected to state, local and federal offices, according to Manisha Sinha, chair of American History at the University of Connecticut, curator of the ALPLM exhibition, and author of a book by the same title as the exhibition.
After initial efforts to address slavery’s wrongs, things went south.
“Reconstruction was overthrown,” Sinha said, “by a violent campaign of domestic terrorism led by the Ku Klu Klan and similar groups, and because the U.S. Supreme Court undid the legal gains for Black people during Reconstruction. We ended up with Jim Crow, or racial segregation in the South, and disfranchisement of Black men and that was not rectified until the Civil Rights movement.”
Blacks were intimidated, lynched and blocked from voting and other rights through new laws. “A racist backlash undid Reconstruction,” Sinha said. “You could say the South did not accept the results of the Civil War.”
The failure of Reconstruction still “haunts” America today, she added. “Those southern elites who overthrew Reconstruction felt they may have lost the war but won the peace in undoing the results of the Civil War, putting Black people to as close a state of slavery as possible. It would take the Civil Rights movement to realize the goals of Reconstruction. But today we are seeing a backlash against the Civil Rights gains of the 20th century. The U.S. Supreme Court has gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965.”
The $1 million question for historians is, would Reconstruction have succeeded if Abraham Lincoln had lived?
“Things really went backward, as one freed slave said, when Lincoln was assassinated, because Lincoln is the first American president to publicly endorse Black citizenship before his death,” Sinha said. “He is really what I call our first Reconstruction president.”
But his successor, Andrew Johnson, was a former southern Democrat and slaveholder from Tennessee.
“Johnson did his best to make sure Reconstruction did not work, and he encouraged former Confederates to resist by pardoning them wholesale. Lincoln’s death was a huge tragedy for American Democracy,” she said.
The Second American Revolution exhibit includes the pen Abraham Lincoln used to sign the Emancipation Proclamation freeing slaves in the South, a chair from Ford’s Theatre where he was assassinated, and – returning Dec. 1 until the exhibition closes – an original copy of the 13th Amendment. The Amendment is so fragile it can only be displayed for limited times.
Central Illinoisans are represented in the artifacts. There’s a bust of former slave Free Frank McWorter, who bought freedom for himself and family members and founded New Philadelphia near Barry, Illinois. It was the first town in America founded by Blacks and is now a National Park Site. A reproduction of a dress worn by his wife, Lucy, stands next to her photo. The two Black men killed during Springfield’s 1908 race riots, William Donnegan and Scott Burton, are represented in a section about the Equal Justice Initiative’s current project to collect soil from documented lynching locations across the country for a museum in Montgomery, Alabama.
“The Second American Revolution” is on display through Jan. 17, 2027.
Tara McClellan McAndrew is a freelance writer in Springfield who enjoys writing about history.
This article appears in 2026 Fall Guide.
