Losing the Civil War crushed the South, both physically and psychologically, but the worst blow was yet to come. On June 13, 1866 in Norfolk, Virginia, Jefferson Davis, the former president of the Confederate States of America was indicted for treason. The physician who attended the imprisoned Jefferson Davis, Dr. John J. Craven, told of Davis' time in Fortress Monroe in his book, The Prison...
In May of 1866, Washington D.C. was embroiled in political challenges. Cholera was spreading throughout the country. In addition, the recently ended Civil War left politicians divided over the issue of Southern representation and reconstruction. The question of how to deal with Southern reconstruction was at an all-time high. By the summer of 1866 the idea of Southern representation in Congress...
The Homestead Act of 1866 was passed on June 21st of that year and opened up public land to settlement and farming by African-Americans and white persons loyal to the Union. Representative George W. Julian a Republican from Indiana proposed the bill, which opened up forty-four million acres of public land in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, and Mississippi in 80 acre lots to freedmen who were...
On February 27, 1866, the Texas Constitutional Convention decided to ban slavery in their new state Constitution. With a vote of 56 to 26, as reported in The Baltimore Sun, the constitution abolished involuntary servitude, except as a form of punishment for crimes, protecting people of African decent in their right to own property and to testify in court. After the peace at Appomattox Courthouse,...
Just as the issue of secession and the firing on Fort Sumter triggered the War Between the States, the issue of readmission (and arguably) the assassination of President Lincoln triggered an almost equally bitter conflict. This conflict, however, arose between the Executive and Legislative branches. It is quite possible that only a man of Lincoln's strength could have succeeded in handling the...
While aboard a steamer ship headed from Alexandria, LA for Shreveport, LA, J.M. Bundy, a northern soldier, witnessed human cruelty and the outrageous poverty encompassing much of the South. Bundy and his Union comrades were invited to ride up the Red River to Shreveport on the Confederate flag-of-truce boat before a conference with southern officers about terms of surrender. Flying towards this...
In 1865, John Ruffin Green, a newcomer to Durham, bought a tobacco factory from Dr. Richard Blacknall. Green knew that there was a future in the manufacturing of tobacco because he noticed the extensive amount of its consumption in the Confederate Army and among university students. Green focused on the manufacture of smoking tobacco by buying only the best grades of leaf. Later that year, a terrible...
After the Civil War ended the focus of politics shifted to reforming the South. Radical Republicans called for universal negro suffrage to be passed by Congress. General Grant stated that if universal negro suffrage was granted there would be a war of extermination in the South. He concluded the only way to enforce such a law would be to place a standing army in the South. In response to these proposals,...
"We are going to work for ourselves and for nobody else." The newly-freed slaves of Thomas Pinckney took this stand when he called them to start working again after the Civil War ended. Pinckney, a plantation owner in South Carolina, did not expect these men to continue working for free, but he realized that without them, his plantation was destined for failure. He stated simply, "I acknowledged...
Throughout 1866, the First Baptist Church in Charleston, South Carolina was rapidly losing its membership. However, on July 1, 1866, something extraordinarily important happened: several black men applied for a blanket "letter of dismission" to cover every "colored member." Prior to this date, the church officers had been unconcerned because the only requests had been from white members, but black...