Part III - Post-war and Reconstruction

The Post-war years and Reconstruction (1865-1877) constitute one of the most dramatic and pivotal periods in American history. Unfortunately, they are also one of the most overlooked and least understood. Most studies (and students) of the War Between the States ignore them; those contemporary publications that do explore them, typically do so through a politically correct, even Marxist, lense.

Part III of The War Between the States: America’s Uncivil War, comprising the last quarter of the book, counters such works, which suggest that with sufficient power—whether lawfully exercised or not--the national government could have cured the nation’s ills, real and imagined, even after four years of unprecedented slaughter did not.

Part III Highlights

• Peace in some ways harsher than war
• Impeachment of President Andrew Johnson
• Thirteenth – Fifteenth Amendments
• Thaddeus Stevens and the Radical Republicans
• Disputed fate of Jefferson Davis
• Rise of vigilante groups such as the Ku Klux Klan
• Struggles of free American blacks
• The South’s struggle to recover from devastation
• More bloody battles
• Robert E. Lee as a leader in peace
• Controversial end of Reconstruction