hundreds of years earlier in the early 1860s, confrontation between the federal government and southern political leaders who were vowing massive resistance to national laws, violence in conflict, violence far greater scale 1860s than 1960s but violence nonetheless. martin luther king trying to get president kennedy to issue a new emancipation proclamation on the 100th anniversary of the first one. the march on washington in 1963. all of these things were crowding together in the early 1960s. that s when i made the decision not at first a very popular decision with professor woodward to shift my focus from looking at the first reconstruction in a state like alabama to looking at the role of the abolitionist after the beginning of the civil war and after the abolition of slavery, which was a preoccupation of my scholarship for the next 15 years with a dissertation and book that grew out of it, the struggle for equality. second book the negro civil war, which was really a s