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The formal Confederate government did
not last much beyond the surrender and parole of its two principal
armies. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia accepted the terms offered by
Ulysses S. Grant on April 9, 1865, while Joseph E. Johnston turned over
scattered remnants of the western forces to General Sherman on April 26.
Other Confederate troops remained in the field, notably units under
Nathan Bedford Forrest and Edmund Kirby Smith, while President Jefferson
Davis traveled through North Carolina and Georgia for a few more weeks,
desperate to organize some form of continued resistance. For its part,
the political leadership of the various Confederate states presumed that
further fighting would produce only an increasingly destructive and
cruel guerilla war. As a result, when the new president, Andrew
Johnson, offered comparatively generous terms for reunion, the several
seceded states began the process of legal reconciliation (Presidential
Reconstruction).
But however much Americans from both
sections might hope to heal the wounds of war, the issues and the
violence raised by the conflict would not damper so easily. Areas hit
hard by guerilla fighting—East Tennessee notably—would see
assassination, feuding, and other crimes go on for some years after the
demise of the secession governments. For its part, Johnson’s
reconstruction plan became enormously controversial in both the South
and North, leading to the forceful intervention of congressional
Republicans into the process by 1866.
Ultimately, the status of the former
slaves proved to be the unsolvable problem. Freed by the grinding
attrition of war, the ex-bondspeople sought to secure as much advantage
as possible from their opportunity while they had the chance, and
pressed to be granted the full rights of American citizenship along with
legitimate access to the means of making a secure living. By contrast,
the ex-Confederate states, and many whites North as well as South,
sought to keep African-Americans in a situation as close to slavery as
possible. When the former seceded states tried to fashion a form of
government-run enslavement by passing a series of Black Codes in 1865
and 1866, Republicans in Congress felt they had no choice but to respond
and, overturning President Johnson’s plan, took charge of the
reconstruction process. What followed was an attempt to guarantee equal
treatment under the law for African-Americans by constitutional fiat
(the Fourteenth Amendment), and to rework the South’s internal political
system so that black citizens would have the chance to secure their own
future for themselves through the normal processes of state government
(the Fifteenth Amendment).
To
say the least, former Confederates saw this form of intervention as
nothing less than political invasion. Ex-slaves were now elevated to
the status of equal political participants, a status imposed by
congressional act as well as the constitutional amendment process. What
came next was a political war against this, punctuated by the terrorism
of organized paramilitary groups like the Ku Klux Klan. By the early
1870s, all the new state governments imposed by congressional
Republicans were either gone or on their way out. In the aftermath, the
former Confederate states began to put in place the beginning pieces of
what would eventually become formal segregation, while turning towards
celebrating the memory of the war in the Lost Cause movement. The
North, experiencing the dislocations of immigrant labor and corporate
industrialization, turned its focus towards these new socioeconomic
problems, abandoning Reconstruction in the South.
For more
information on the years following the war:
Timeline
or Resources
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