Chapter 1 What Does Freedom Mean?: Reconstruction, 1865–1877

The Civil War ended in April 1865, but the end of combat did not mean that the nation had resolved all of the issues that had led it to war. After the Confederate surrender at Appomattox, America faced the task of Reconstruction—a broad term referring to the rebuilding of the war-torn South and the political reunification of the nation. For many Americans, Reconstruction was a time of personal reconciliation and rebuilding. Soldiers sought to reconstruct lives as civilians. Black and white farmers who had lost their land or otherwise been displaced during the war did their best to reconstruct lives as urban laborers. Families severed by sectionalism sought reunion while those who had lost husbands and fathers experienced their own version of reconstruction. Veterans and widows found comfort in one another, adopted orphans, and literally reconstructed families that had been destroyed by the war. For tens of thousands of the war’s wounded, reconstruction took on a literal meaning as they sought to rebuild their shattered bodies with artificial limbs and resume life as laborers and farmers.

The postwar period was also a time when ideas about race and gender were challenged. Black leaders pushed for full political, legal, and economic equality. Women increasingly formed organizations and lobbied for the recognition of these same rights. Although they were denied the ballot in all but a handful of Western communities during Reconstruction, women who had managed farms, worked as teachers and nurses, directed relief societies, and entered the workforce as laborers during the Civil War continued to challenge traditional ideas about women’s roles in society. In so doing, they reconstructed their own identities and the very notion of womanhood.

With the exception of a small but growing number of suffragists and their supporters, issues of gender equality were perceived as being secondary to questions about race and the condition of former slaves. Former slave owners sought to reconstruct plantation agriculture in an era without slavery. They were opposed by 4 million former slaves who attempted to define for themselves the meaning of emancipation and determine their own places within the postwar economy. Of foremost importance to these individuals were the reconstruction of family and community, equal economic opportunity, and the full recognition of political rights. As a result, issues surrounding black suffrage and the economic condition of former slaves occupied the nation’s attention throughout Reconstruction.

While individuals coped with the aftermath of war and the meaning of freedom, the nation faced difficult questions about how the South would transition from plantation slavery to a system of free labor. Americans also debated whether Confederate leaders should face trial for the crime of treason and whether the South should be held responsible for the Union’s wartime expenses. Further deliberations regarding the vast sums needed to rebuild Southern cities, harbors, railroads, and levees revealed the continued divisions between Northerners and Southerners. Some Northerners argued that confiscation of the land and property of Confederate rebels would serve as punishment for Southern treason while also providing the government with revenue to settle war debts and fund reconstruction projects. African American leaders argued that Confederate land and property might be redistributed to former slaves as reparationPayment for a previous wrongdoing. In the case of slavery, the victims requested but never received compensation for their unpaid labor and suffering. for years of unpaid toil. Such resources would provide a degree of material security and economic independence for some of the most vulnerable Southerners. However, most whites simply wished a return to the status quo, minus slavery. They assumed that former slaves would become agricultural wage laborers on the farms and plantations that were owned by their former masters. These individuals believed that redistribution of property was a violation of the limited powers granted to the federal government and might lead to greater political and economic instability.