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15 - Reconstruction during the Civil War

from Part III - Outcomes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 October 2019

By
Mark Wahlgren Summers
Edited by
Aaron Sheehan-Dean
Aaron Sheehan-Dean
Affiliation:
Louisiana State University
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Summary

Reconstruction did not just follow the Civil War. It got several months’ head start on it. From the moment that South Carolina declared itself out of the Union, plans had been plentiful as blackberries for uniting the nation again. Some were more outlandish than others: the creation of vying confederacies, with one in the Ohio Valley or another encompassing the Upper South, a free city of New York, a fresh constitutional convention, a series of amendments to resolve the slavery issue, a single amendment guaranteeing the right of states to make slavery lawful. But all were groping for the terms on which eventual reunion occurred, and some of them outlasted the war itself, notably the proposal to call a convention of all the states to set the terms.

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Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of the American Civil War , pp. 308 - 329
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

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References

Key Works

Belz, Herman. Emancipation and Equal Rights: Politics and Constitutionalism in the Civil War Era (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978).Google Scholar
Belz, Herman. Reconstructing the Union: Theory and Policy during the Civil War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1969).Google Scholar
Cox, LaWanda. Lincoln and Black Freedom (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1981).Google Scholar
Harris, William C. Lincoln and the Border States: Preserving the Union (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2011).Google Scholar
Harris, William C. With Charity for All: Lincoln and the Restoration of the Union (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997).Google Scholar
Hyman, Harold M. A More Perfect Union: The Impact of the Civil War and Reconstruction on the Constitution (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975).Google Scholar
Oakes, James. Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861–1865 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013).Google Scholar
Richardson, Heather Cox. The Greatest Nation of the Earth: Republican Economic Policies during the Civil War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).Google Scholar
Rodrigue, Jon C. Lincoln and Reconstruction (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press, 2013).Google Scholar
Simpson, Brooks D. The Reconstruction Presidents (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998).Google Scholar
Summers, Mark W. The Ordeal of the Reunion (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014).Google Scholar
Vorenberg, Michael. Final Freedom: The Civil War, the Abolition of Slavery, and the Thirteenth Amendment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).Google Scholar
Wagandt, Charles L. The Mighty Revolution: Negro Emancipation in Maryland, 1862–1864 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1964).Google Scholar

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