In November 1865 a group of 52 black delegates met in Charleston's Zion Church to formulate a position regarding their future in the still uncertain world of the post-emancipation South. Their address invoked the language of the Declaration of Independence to claim full rights of citizenship for themselves, rights that were endangered by widespread southern "Black Codes." The Black Codes were a series of laws introduced in the months after the war by the reconstituted state legislatures of the South. These laws were enacted to restrict the movements and employment possibilities of blacks regardless of whether they had been free or enslaved before the war?in essence to replace the constrictions of slavery.

Isabelle Van Wagenen was born enslaved in New York State and became a well-known abolitionist speaker under the name Sojourner Truth after gaining her freedom in 1827. She moved to New York City where she engaged in evangelical and other reform activities; at various points she also lived in several utopian communities. Truth supported herself by traveling and speaking on abolitionist and women's rights subjects, taking the name Sojourner Truth in 1843. She often faced opposition at her speaking engagements. Truth made this extemporaneous speech in Akron Ohio in 1851 at a women's rights meeting. No direct record of the speech exists, but Frances Gage, a white activist and author who was presiding over the meeting, recalled it over a decade later. While some historians have questioned Gage's accuracy in reconstructing the syntax and even the exact language of Truth's oration, the power and charismatic force of her argument about the equality of women remains evident.

Since at least the 1830s, New York working women endured low pay, long hours, and difficult working conditions. Concerned observers noted that some were even forced to turn to prostitution to supplement their meager incomes. During the Civil War, poor men flocked to the army (wealthier men could purchase substitutes for $300). The women left behind were now responsible for supporting families on their own. While wartime production created additional opportunities for women to work, it also led to even greater exploitation as factory owners pushed their workers to turn out more goods. Under these conditions, some women, such as this one, suggested that collective action might provide a solution.

The Five Points was a notorious mid-nineteenth century New York City slum. Located just east of the fashionable stores, columned banks, and well-dressed crowds of Broadway, its squalor served to remind New Yorkers of the destitution that so closely underlay the city's surging wealth. The neighborhood included the infamous "Old Brewery," which had once been a real brewery but by mid-century had degenerated into a miserable tenement dwelling for the very poor. In the early 1850s the New York Ladies Home Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church purchased the "Old Brewery," demolished it, and built a mission on the site. The women of the Home Missionary Society made children their first concern, as, increasingly, did many other reformers of this period. While in this selection these Protestant missionary women showcase the children's gratitude, many Irish-Catholic immigrant families resented the missionaries' assumption of superiority and regarded their proselytizing as antagonistic to their own desire to pass on their religious beliefs to their children.

After the Civil War began, slaves were sometimes seized from their masters and forced into service for the Confederate army. This illustration from a May 1862 issue of Harper's Weekly depicted one way that the institution of slavery contributed to the Confederacy's war effort. According to the caption, the northern newspaper artist observed this struggle between two Negroes and a rebel captain" through a telescope. The captain "insisted upon their loading a cannon within range of [Union] Sharpshooters. . . . [He] succeeded in forcing the Negroes to expose themselves

Americans were not prepared for the ravages of modern warfare. Early in the war, artists often drew highly romantic and very inaccurate pictures. Soldiers in the field viewed such feats as firing from the saddle with great amusement; they enjoyed seeing illustrations of their exploits almost as much as they enjoyed criticizing their inaccuracies. As the war continued and the carnage mounted, increasingly realistic battlefield sketches conveyed the horrors of war to the northern public.

Although Thomas Nast was an ardent supporter of equal rights, he often resorted to racial and ethnic stereotypes in his Harper's Weekly cartoons. Questioning the actions of some southern black Republican legislators, in the cartoon on the left Nast drew the figure of "Columbia," symbol of the nation, chiding: "You are aping the lowest whites. If you disgrace your race in this way you had better take back seats." Nast got a taste of his own medicine in this answering cartoon (right) on the cover of the New York Daily Graphic, entitled "I Wonder How Harper's Artist Likes To Be Offensively Caricatured Himself?" Such consciousness in the press about offensive imagery would not last long. By the 1880s, with the end of a national commitment to black equality, racist stereotypes characterized most published cartoons and illustrations.

After the fall of Atlanta in 1864, the Union Army under General William T. Sherman marched through Georgia to the sea, bringing destruction in its wake. Nearly 18,000 slaves left plantations and attached themselves to the army during its march. This 1865 illustration showed a stereotyped view of the men, women, and children who followed Sherman's army. But to northern readers, the engraving's significance may have lay in its unmistakable message about slaves' utter hatred of slavery. The oft expressed fallacy that they preferred slavery to freedom

The author of this letter, who used the pseudonym "Dame Shirley," was Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clapp (1819-1906). The letter was written to Clapp's sister, Molly, in Massachusetts, but was subsequently published as one of a series of twenty-three in the Pioneer, a California literary magazine. Clapp's subject in the "Shirley letters," as they are called, was life at the gold mining camps of mid-19th-century California. Clapp knew about life in the world of California gold mining from first-hand experience. With her husband, a doctor, Clapp left the East Coast for California in 1849. At first the couple settled in San Francisco, but in 1851 they left for the Sierra Nevada mountains so that Dr. Clapp could regain his health in the mountain air. In the Sierra Nevadas, they spent more than a year at two gold mining camps, Rich Bar and Indian Bar, on the Feather River. As the self-conscious tone of these letters suggests, Clapp aspired to be a literary writer. As a woman, her perspective on life in the nearly all-male camps was unique. The letters allegedly provided material for Bret Harte's stories. Today we can appreciate them for their historical value as observations of life during the California gold rush.

Started by Confederate veterans in 1866 and led by prominent planters, the Ku Klux Klan grew quickly during Radical Reconstruction. Hooded Klansmen terrorized individuals and freedpeoples organizations, breaking up meetings, shooting and lynching Union League leaders, and driving people away from the polls across the South. In its nighttime whippings, killings, and rapes, the Klan targeted freedpeople who showed signs of independence, such as those who bought or rented their own land, or community leaders, such as teachers. The criminal, terrorist nature of the organization was later glossed over. By the turn of the century, popular novels like Thomas Dixon, Jr.'s The Traitor, published in 1907, transformed the bloody record of the Ku Klux Klan (here softened by the euphemism Invisible Empire") into tales of gallantry

From its inception, the Confederacy sought international recognition from European nations. Support from Europe would help persuade the North to accept Southern independence, and, more immediately, secure a source of manufactured goods needed for the war effort. Southern efforts to gain recognition focused on England, the largest purchaser of southern cotton. This 1862 cartoon from the northern satirical weekly, Vanity Fair, presented the Confederacy's president trying to gain diplomatic recognition from a skeptical Great Britain. I hardly think it will wash

Elizabeth Hobbs Keckley was born around 1818 in Virginia, a slave of the Burwell family. At fourteen she was loaned to the Rev. Robert Burwell, her master's son, who lived in North Carolina. There she gave birth to her son George, the product of an unwanted encounter with a white man. After several unhappy years with Robert Burwell and his family, Keckley was sent to live in St. Louis with Anne Burwell Garland, a married daughter of the Burwells. In this selection from her 1868 memoir Behind the Scenes, Keckley describes how she bought her freedom from the Garland family, a process that was completed in November 1855. Her sincere efforts to live within slavery's rules are striking and indicate how deeply the slave system's practices and values permeated both the black and white cultures of the South. After her emancipation Keckley earned her living as a dressmaker in Washington, D.C.; she died there in poverty in 1907.

After the War for Independence, the northern states slowly abolished slavery. However, the rising population of northern free blacks still faced significant obstacles in their struggle to achieve economic and social liberty. African Americans in New England remained concentrated in the seaport cities, often clustered in low-paying jobs. Successful entrepreneurs and skilled traders still faced discrimination as well as opposition from white wageworkers. William J. Brown had been born in 1814 into a free black family in Providence, Rhode Island. His father was a sailor and laborer and his mother was the daughter of an African-American slave and Narragansett Indian woman. William became an artisan and leader in Providence's African-American community. But he described his uphill struggle to find work and obtain respect from his fellow New Englanders in his autobiography Life of William J. Brown of Providence (1883).

During the Civil War, when Union forces occupied the South Carolina sea islands of St. Helena and Port Royal, white slaveowners fled but their slaves remained. It was here, in October 1862, that Charlotte Forten arrived under the auspices of the Philadelphia Port Royal Relief Association to teach the newly liberated slaves. Forten (later Charlotte Forten Grimke) was born in Philadelphia in 1837 into a family of well-to-do, free blacks who were active in the abolitionist movement. Forten was a teacher and a writer, known today for her extensive diaries and her articles. An educated woman and a product of free black society, Forten hovered uneasily between the worlds of blacks and whites. In this article for a white audience she expressed her jubilation about the freedom her students were newly experiencing. She also revealed her ambivalence about these people who were similar to herself, yet at the same time so different.

In 1870, two years after the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified, guaranteeing freedpeople rights as U.S. citizens, Congress responded to racial violence in the South by providing additional constitutional protection for the black electorate. The Fifteenth Amendment declared that the right of U.S. citizens to vote could not be abridged or denied" by any state "on account of race

This African-American family was photographed in 1862 after Union forces captured the Sea Island coastal area of South Carolina. One of four photographs taken by Timothy O'Sullivan of the J. J. Smith plantation, this picture was subsequently exhibited at Alexander Gardner's Washington, D.C., photography gallery in September 1863. In contrast to this Beaufort, South Carolina, family the history of the slave family was usually characterized by constant efforts by enslaved African Americans to maintain continuity in the face of forced break-ups and sales (exemplified in the naming of children to mark lineage).

Few Anglos lived in San Antonio after the Texas Revolution of 1835-36 and Tejanos (Texas-Mexicans) continued their rule. Juan Nepomuceno Seguin was born into a prominent tejano family and had close ties with Stephen Austin, leader of the first American settlers in Texas. He became mayor or alcade at an early age and fought on the Anglo side with the coming of Texas' revolt against Mexico. However, his political situation increasingly became fragile because of the changing balance of power and Anglos' efforts to wrest control. When the Mexican General Vasquez captured San Antonio in 1842, he announced that Seguin held loyalties to Mexico and Seguin's enemies denounced him as a spy. Seguin fled to Mexico. Those Tejanos who remained in Texas often found their livestock and corn stolen; others had their land taken in disputes. After the Mexican War of 1846-48, Seguin returned north. The writing and publication of the Personal Memoirs of John N. Seguin was part of his effort to set the story straight and appeal to Americans while also lashing out about the conflicted position of Mexican Texans.

Elizabeth Hobbs Keckley was born in slavery in Virginia around 1818 and purchased her freedom in 1855. In 1862 she was living in Washington DC and working as a skilled dressmaker; her principal client was Mary Todd Lincoln, wife of the president. Keckley sympathized with the former slaves, or "contraband," as they were called, who fled to the relative safety of Washington during the Civil War. The Contraband Relief Association, which Keckley founded and headed, gathered funds and clothing for the poor former slaves. Yet, as her rather condescending remarks make clear, Keckley felt superior to the people she helped. Keckley's memoir Behind the Scenes was published in 1868. The book included revelations about Mary Lincoln's private life, and, feeling betrayed, the former First Lady shunned Keckley. Her dressmaking business declined, and she died in poverty in 1907 at the Home for Destitute Women and Children in Washington, one of the institutions she had helped to found.

The vision of a "New South" was heralded by southern landowners, entrepreneurs, and newspaper editors in the decades following the Confederacy's defeat in 1865 and the abolition of racial slavery across the South. These "New South" boosters argued that, with its plantation economy destroyed by the Civil War and Reconstruction, the South would develop a new economy more attuned to the industrial capitalism that defined the rest of the American economy. Atlanta Constitution editor Henry Grady was the leading exponent of a "New South" based on industrial development, giving speeches throughout the country and writing articles and editorials in his newspaper. Both of the following speeches by Grady--one given in Boston in 1889, the other in New York in 1886--conveyed not only the message of industrialization as a panacea, but also Grady's fierce regional pride and his general moderation on racial issues, which were becoming increasingly contentious in these years.