Beginning in 1866, John William De Forest served fifteen months as an agent of the Freedmen's Bureau in Greenville, South Carolina. After he left the army, wrote a series of magazine articles about the bureau's operation as it intersected with the daily lives of freedmen. In 1948 the articles were compiled in A Union Officer in the Reconstruction, which offers a deft analysis of the structure of southern society after the war. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

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.

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.

Report on the Condition of the South is a title written by Carl Christian Schurz, who was a German revolutionary and an American statesman, journalist, and reformer. Schurz was sent through the South to make a tour and report on the economic conditions there. This book represents not only the information the author gathered, but provides us also with his insight into the topic of slavery.

From the "preeminent historian of Reconstruction" (New York Times Book Review), a newly updated edition of the prize-winning classic work on the post-Civil War period which shaped modern America, with a new introduction from the author. Eric Foner's "masterful treatment of one of the most complex periods of American history" (New Republic) redefined how the post-Civil War period was viewed. Reconstruction chronicles the way in which Americans—black and white—responded to the unprecedented changes unleashed by the war and the end of slavery. It addresses the ways in which the emancipated slaves' quest for economic autonomy and equal citizenship shaped the political agenda of Reconstruction; the remodeling of Southern society and the place of planters, merchants, and small farmers within it; the evolution of racial attitudes and patterns of race relations; and the emergence of a national state possessing vastly expanded authority and committed, for a time, to the principle of equal rights for all Americans. This "smart book of enormous strengths" (Boston Globe) remains the standard work on the wrenching post-Civil War period—an era whose legacy still reverberates in the United States today.

"The rough-and-tumble world of nineteenth-century New Orleans was a sanitation nightmare, with the city's slaughterhouses dumping animal remains into local backwaters. When Louisiana authorized a monopoly slaughterhouse to bring about sanitation reform, hundreds of independent butchers sued, framing their cases as an infringement of rights protected by the recently passed Fourteenth Amendment. The surviving cases that reached the U.S. Supreme Court pitted the butchers' right to labor against the state's "police power" to regulate public health. The result in 1873 was a controversial 5-4 decision that for the first time addressed the meaning and import of the Fourteenth Amendment. While ruling that Louisiana had legitimately exercised its powers, the Court's majority went much further to declare that the amendment - and its "due process" and "equal protection" clauses - applied exclusively to the plight of former slaves and, thus, were unavailable to any other American."--BOOK JACKET.