By Walter Lynwood Fleming A Chronicle Of the Reunion of the States New Haven: Yale University Press Toronto: Glasgow, Brook & Co. London: Humphrey Milford Oxford University Press 1919 Copyright, 1919 by Yale University Press...

The Aftermath of War When the armies of the Union and of the Confederacy were disbanded in 1865, two matters had been settled beyond further dispute: the negro was to be free, and the Union was to be perpetuated. But though slavery and state sovereignty were no longer at issue, there were still many problems which pressed for solution. The huge task of reconstruction must be faced. The nature of the situation required that the measures of reconstruction be first formulated in Washington by the v

When Freedom Cried Out The negro is the central figure in the reconstruction of the South. Without the negro there would have been no Civil War. Granting a war fought for any other cause, the task of reconstruction would, without him, have been comparatively simple. With him, however, reconstruction meant more than the restoring of shattered resources; it meant the more or less successful attempt to obtain and secure for the freedman civil and political rights, and to improve his economic and so

The Work of the Presidents The war ended slavery, but it left the problem of the freed slave; it preserved the Union in theory, but it left unsolved many delicate problems of readjustment. Were the seceded States in or out of the Union? If in the Union, what rights had they? If they were not in the Union, what was their status? What was the status of the Southern Unionist, of the ex-Confederate? What punishments should be inflicted upon the Southern people? What authority, executive or legislati

The Wards of the Nation The negroes at the close of the war were not slaves or serfs, nor were they citizens. What was to be done with them and for them? The Southern answer to this question may be found in the so-called "Black Laws," which were enacted by the state governments set up by President Johnson. The views of the dominant North may be discerned in part in the organization and administration of the Freedmen's Bureau. The two sections saw the same problem from different angles and their

The Victory of the Radicals The soldiers who fought through the war to victory or to defeat had been at home nearly two years before the radicals developed sufficient strength to carry through their plans for a revolutionary reconstruction of the Southern States. At the end of the war a majority of the Northern people would have supported a settlement in accordance with Lincoln's policy. Eight months later a majority, but a smaller one, would have supported Johnson's work had it been possible to

The Rule of the Major Generals From the passage of the reconstruction acts to the close of Johnson's Administration, Congress, working the will of the radical majority, was in supreme control. The army carried out the will of Congress and to that body, not to the President, the commanding general and his subordinates looked for direction. The official opposition of the President to the policy of Congress ceased when that policy was enacted into law. He believed this legislation to be unconstitut

The Trial of President Johnson While the radical program was being executed in the South, Congress was engaged not only in supervising reconstruction but in subduing the Supreme Court and in "conquering" President Johnson. One must admire the efficiency of the radical machine. When the Southerners showed that they preferred military rule as permitted by the Act of the 2nd of March, Congress passed the Act of the 23d of March which forced the reconstruction. When the President ventured to assert

The Union League of America The elections of 1867-68 showed that the negroes were well organized under the control of the radical Republican leaders and that their former masters had none of the influence over the blacks in political matters which had been feared by some Northern friends of the negro and had been hoped for by such Southern leaders as Governor Patton and General Hampton. Before 1865 the discipline of slavery, the influence of the master's family, and of the Southern church, had s

Church and School Reconstruction in the State was closely related to reconstruction in the churches and the schools. Here also were to be found the same hostile elements: negro and white, Unionist and Confederate, victor and vanquished. The church was at that time an important institution in the South, more so than in the North, and in both sections more important than it is today. It was inevitable, therefore, that ecclesiastical reconstruction should give rise to bitter feelings. Something sho

Carpetbag and Negro Rule The Southern States reconstructed by Congress were subject for periods of varying length to governments designed by radical Northerners and imposed by elements thrown to the surface in the upheaval of Southern society. Georgia, Virginia, and North Carolina each had a brief experience with these governments; other States escaped after four or five years, while Louisiana, South Carolina, and Florida were not delivered from this domination until 1876. The States which conta

The Ku Klux Movement The Ku Klux movement, which took the form of secret revolutionary societies, grew out of a general conviction among the whites that the reconstruction policies were impossible and not to be endured. Somers, an English traveler, says that at this time "nearly every respectable white man in the Southern States was not only disfranchised but under fear of arrest or confiscation; the old foundations of authority were utterly razed before any new ones had yet been laid, and in th

The Changing South "The bottom rail is on top" was a phrase which had flashed throughout the late Confederate States. It had been coined by the negroes in 1867 to express their view of the situation, but its aptness had been recognized by all. After ten years of social and economic revolution, however, it was not so clear that the phrase of 1867 correctly described the new situation. "The white man made free" would have been a more accurate epitome, for the white man had been able, in spite of h

Restoration of Home Rule The radical program of reconstruction ended after ten years in failure rather because of a change in public opinion in the North than because of the resistance of the Southern whites. The North of 1877, indeed, was not the North of 1867. A more tolerant attitude toward the South developed as the North passed through its own period of misgovernment when all the large cities were subject to "ring rule" and corruption, as in New York under "Boss" Tweed and in the District o

The best general accounts of the reconstruction period are found in James Ford Rhodes's History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850 to the Restoration of Home Rule at the South in 1877, volumes V, VI, VII (1906); in William A. Dunning's Reconstruction, Political and Economic, 1865-1877 , in the American Nation Series, volume XXII (1907); and in Peter Joseph Hamilton's The Reconstruction Period (1905), which is volume XVI of The History of North America, edited by F. N. Thorpe. The w