The President's Plan for Reconstruction
For more than four million African Americans living in the Southern United States, the end of the Civil War (1861–65) brought the freedom they had hoped for during all the long years of slavery. Ever since the arrival of the first white colonists in the New World, blacks captured in Africa and transported across the sea on slave ships had toiled without pay in fields and as house servants in the South. They had endured harsh conditions with remarkable strength and adaptability. Freedom brought great joy and expanded opportunities, but it also created new challenges. Probably the most threatening was the resentment of white Southerners, who found this changed society—and especially their new relationship with blacks—hard to accept.
A Changed Society
Northern journalists who traveled south in the days following the war's April 1865 conclusion found a devastated landscape littered with the debris of the bloody conflict: torn-up railroads, bridges, and fences; fields overgrown withweeds; ruined walls and chimneys left in the wake of an invading army that had burned everything in its path. They found black people both jubilant and in need of help as they tried to establish independent lives. White Southerners, meanwhile, were reeling not only from their personal losses but from the collapse of their society and economy.
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