The period immediately following the Civil War was a time of enormous change, not only in the South but in the cities, on the Great Plains and in America's factories and other workplaces. Standards of living rose and fell at the same time—for many it was the best of times, for millions of others, an ongoing nightmare.

The process of reconstruction following the Civil War was confined mostly to the South. Although the North suffered greater casualties during the war, the human losses were a much smaller portion of the population, and there was little physical damage in the North. But the South was devastated: crops had been destroyed, homes and factories blasted and burned, railroads torn up; in the Shenandoah Valley, and in Georgia and the Carolinas in the path of Sherman's march, the evidence was visible everywhere.

With the freeing of the slaves, and the economic ravages of the war, Southern human and financial capital were depleted. Plantation owners had lost their source of cheap labor, and the former slaves, who possessed farming and related skills, had no land on which to practice them. Much bitterness existed on both sides; whites, both poor and rich, tended to focus their frustration on the black population, whether they deserved it or not. And although the Freedman celebrated their new liberty with enthusiasm, the 200 years of slavery had left their scars, both physical and emotional.

As historian Eric Foner and others have pointed out, reconstruction of the South would have been an enormous challenge under any circumstances and with the best of leaders. But Lincoln, whom some claimed would have been the best friend the South had ever had, even though many Southerners hated and “hoped he would burn in hell all his days,” was dead, and President Johnson, although a Tennessean, was no friend of the South. Congress was controlled by Republican radicals, who placed a high priority on achieving economic and citizenship rights for the Freedman, but often without much understanding of the social conditions in the South that made any accommodation problematic.

Reconstruction was thus a complex task, with challenges both physical and human, and all the problems had to be confronted against a background of economic degradation. What happened in the South after the Civil War was a revolution, but its culmination would not be seen for decades to come.

This section of the course focuses on the former slave population in the South, the Freedmen and Women who, after 200 years of bondage, suddenly found themselves free. African Americans celebrated the end of slavery, but were soon disillusioned as they discovered that there is much more to freedom than the absence of slavery.  For them, and for whites as well, Reconstruction was a frustrating experience, yet it contained the distant promise of future reform in the area of civil rights. Much of the population and the political leadership seemed either incapable of grasping what was going on or powerless to do anything about it.

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