ABSTRACT
In April 1865, after four years of hostilities, the American Civil War came to an end at Appomattox Courthouse. With over 250,000 Confederate and more than 360,000 Union soldiers and civilians dead, the war had taken an enormous physical and psychological toll on the young nation.1 Entire areas of the South lay decimated, and millions of dollars had been spent by both sides to support their campaigns. As Historian Shelby Foote succinctly states: “Few wars…had been so proportionately expensive, either in money or in blood.”2 The close of the war brought attendant cultural difficulties as well. Southern blacks were now ostensibly free to pursue life outside the confines of forced plantation labor, and the cessation of hostilities promised increased movement between the North and South. But as the hardships of Reconstruction showed, reuniting a torn nation still grappling with issues of slavery, expansion, and migration was a daunting task that would take many years simply to understand, let alone solve. Postbellum America was engaged in a continual struggle to craft a political, social, and economic reality that was both separate from Europe and inclusive of the North and the South. Part of this national identity emerged after the country was reunified, for as Foote argues: “Whatever else the veterans [both in the North and the South] brought or failed to bring home with them…they had acquired a sense of nationhood, or nationality.”3 Even with a developing notion of what constituted America on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line, the country nonetheless found itself in continued hard economic times as it recovered from the debt of the war and strained to find a place for black Americans.4 Though the war was over, preservation of the Union did not necessarily translate into a shared nationwide sense of equality or cultural purpose.
