Re-evaluation of Andrew Johnson's role as President, and history of the political scene, from 1865 to 1868.

More than 150 years after the end of the Civil War, scores of websites, articles, and organizations repeat claims that anywhere between 500 and 100,000 free and enslaved African Americans fought willingly as soldiers in the Confederate army. But as Kevin M. Levin argues in this carefully researched book, such claims would have shocked anyone who served in the army during the war itself. Levin explains that imprecise contemporary accounts, poorly understood primary-source material, and other misrepresentations helped fuel the rise of the black Confederate myth. Moreover, Levin shows that belief in the existence of black Confederate soldiers largely originated in the 1970s, a period that witnessed both a significant shift in how Americans remembered the Civil War and a rising backlash against African Americans' gains in civil rights and other realms. Levin also investigates the roles that African Americans actually performed in the Confederate army, including personal body servants and forced laborers. He demonstrates that regardless of the dangers these men faced in camp, on the march, and on the battlefield, their legal status remained unchanged. Even long after the guns fell silent, Confederate veterans and other writers remembered these men as former slaves and not as soldiers, an important reminder that how the war is remembered often runs counter to history.

Stephen Atkins Swails is a forgotten American hero. A free Black in the North before the Civil War began, Swails exhibited such exemplary service in the 54th Massachusetts Infantry that he became the first African American commissioned as a combat officer in the United States military. After the war, Swails remained in South Carolina, where he held important positions in the Freedmen’s Bureau, helped draft a progressive state constitution, served in the state senate, and secured legislation benefiting newly liberated Black citizens. Swails remained active in South Carolina politics after Reconstruction until violent Redeemers drove him from the state. After Swails died in 1900, state and local leaders erased him from the historical narrative. Gordon C. Rhea’s biography, one of only a handful for any of the nearly 200,000 African Americans who fought in the Civil War or figured prominently in Reconstruction, restores Swails’s remarkable legacy. Swails’s life story is a saga of an indomitable human being who confronted deep-seated racial prejudice in various institutions but nevertheless reached significant milestones in the fight for racial equality, especially within the military. His is an inspiring story that is especially timely today.

- This book contains custom design elements for each chapter. This classic of American literature, a dramatic autobiography of the early life of an American slave, was first published in 1845, when its author had just achieved his freedom. Its shocking first-hand account of the horrors of slavery became an international best seller. His eloquence led Frederick Douglass to become the first great African-American leader in the United States. • Douglass rose through determination, brilliance and eloquence to shape the American Nation. • He was an abolitionist, human rights and women’s rights activist, orator, author, journalist, publisher and social reformer • His personal relationship with Abraham Lincoln helped persuade the President to make emancipation a cause of the Civil War.

Describes the society and the institutions that went down during the Civil War and Reconstruction and the internal conditions of Alabama during the war. Emphasizes the social and economic problems in the general situation, as well as the educational, religious, and industrial aspects of the period.

Drawing on a large body of documents, including eyewitness accounts and evidence from the site itself, Keith explores the racial tensions that led to the Colfax massacre - during which surrendering blacks were mercilessly slaughtered - and the reverberations this message of terror sent throughout the South.

Our Documents is a collection of 100 documents that the staff of the National Archives has judged most important to the development of the United States. The entry for each document includes a short introduction, a facsimile, and a transcript of the document. Backmatter includes further reading, credits, and index. The book is part of the much larger Our Documents initiative sponsored by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), National History Day, the Corporation for National and Community Service, and the USA Freedom Corps.