Freedom by the Sword - US Army Center Of Military History

Chapter 14
Reconstruction, 1865–1867
The business of Reconstruction began before the federal government had
settled on a policy of Emancipation or organized a single regiment of black soldiers.
The chief concern at first was to create stable, loyal governments in states
that had left the Union. Efforts to install such governments began early in 1862,
not long after Nashville became the first capital of a seceded state to fall to a federal
army. On 4 March, Andrew Johnson, who had remained in the U.S. Senate
when Tennessee seceded, received an appointment as brigadier general of U.S.
Volunteers and assumed the post of military governor of that state. Later in the
war, other attempts to install Unionist state governments gave impetus to federal
military offensives in Florida and Louisiana (see Map 10). 1
As Union armies moved south, they met the black residents of each state. On
the Sea Islands of South Carolina, soldiers found slaves tending their own garden
plots on plantations from which white owners had fled. In other parts of the Confederacy,
escaped slaves thronged the camps of the advancing troops or settled
in shantytowns on the outskirts of occupied cities. Whether black Southerners
waited for the liberators to arrive or rushed to meet them, Union soldiers saw the
former slaves as a problem that required food, shelter, and direction in performing
useful labor. While putting to work the able-bodied residents of plantations
and camps and providing food and shelter for others, federal administrators also
had to decide what to do with the plantations of disloyal owners. Congress had
declared these lands forfeit to the federal government and provided for their sale
or lease in a series of laws enacted between August 1861 and July 1864. Often,
administrators used these plantations as settlement sites for former slaves, who
1 The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and
Confederate Armies, 70 vols. in 128 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1880–1901),
ser. 1, 7: 424–33; vol. 10, pt. 2, p. 612 (hereafter cited as OR). Leroy P. Graf et al., eds., The
Papers of Andrew Johnson, 16 vols. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1967–2000), 5:
177, 182 (hereafter cited as Johnson Papers); Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished
Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), pp. 35–37, 43–50; Peter Maslowski,
Treason Must Be Made Odious: Military Occupation and Wartime Reconstruction in Nashville,
Tennessee, 1862–65 (Millwood, N.Y.: KTO Press, 1978), pp. 19–20; Ted Tunnell, Crucible of
Reconstruction: War, Radicalism, and Race in Louisiana, 1862–1877 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana
State University Press, 1984), pp. 44–50.