The presidential election in November 1864 following on the heels of their army’s victories signaled the beginning of the end of the war for many optimistic Northerners. The people of Massachusetts sensed a happy conclusion to be on the horizon and on January 4, 1865, the state’s legislature made it clear. “By the election of Mr. Lincoln, it has been settled, that from ocean to ocean, from Aroostook to the Rio Grande, there shall be but one nation,” Jonathan E. Field, president of the state senate, proclaimed. Importantly, he also noted that the united country would be a different, better kind of place compared to its antebellum self. Anticipating the abolition amendment that Congress would send to the states for approval at the end of the month, he noted that the country would soon be free of slavery. “The breeze that opens . . . [the national flag’s] folds,” he declaimed, “will cool the brow of no unpaid toil, will fan the cheek of no slave.”1
The spring’s developments rewarded Northern anticipation. As they had done in 1861, Bostonians awaited news of military progress on the streets, expecting editors to post information as soon as it became available. When the wires brought news of the fall of Richmond, they and residents in surrounding communities rang church bells, listened to speeches, fired salutes, and watched parades.2 “Isn’t it Glorious?” wrote Caroline Woolsey, “New York has stood on its head, and the bulls and bears of Wall street for once left off their wrangling, and sang Old Hundred.”3 Stockbridge in the western part of Massachusetts celebrated “with guns drums, bells, and bonfires.” In the evening, “bonfires blaze . . . and gun powder and bad tobacco smoke made the night as gloriously hideous as the most enthusiastic could desire.” Nearby Pittsfield missed out on artillery barrages, but “the fire worshippers had to console themselves with rockets, &c., of which the display was good.”4
Shortly thereafter, Northerners understood that with Lee’s surrender on April 9, the war was virtually over. The rebel government had disintegrated and, according to George Templeton Strong, “Napoleon could hardly save Joe Johnston’s army,” the other major Confederate force east of the Mississippi River.5 Public joy spread across the North providing opportunities for communities to identify with the war effort, to socialize, and to memorialize the long-awaited defeat of what so many of them had considered at one time Lee’s invincible army. On April 10, the Unionists of Fort Wayne, Indiana, were especially pleased with how victory unfolded on the home front at the expense of their wartime political enemies. They announced the surrender of the “Rebel City of Fort Wayne,” a Democratic, antiwar stronghold. Fort Wayne put on a celebration that matched the jubilant activities of the bigger Northern cities. Loyal citizens finally were able to raise a national flag above the courthouse, something that had been missing during the war. Businesses closed, and the usual celebratory noise filled the town. “The Copperhead funeral,” as a telegram from Union citizens reported, was “largely attended.”6 Indeed, next door in Ohio, according to Andrew Evans, Copperheads had turned quiet in their opposition to the war effort; the recent success of the federal government “has taken the wind out of their sails. You can hardly get on[e] of them to jaw back to a union man.”7
As Ohioan Cornelius Madden explained to his father on April 10, 1865, “This is the glorious day that we have been looking forward to, with longing eyes, for the past four years and now it has dawned in all its brightness.”8 Later in April, Charles Hale declared in an editorial printed in the Boston Daily Advertiser “that the substantial principles of American liberty shall go down unimpaired to all time.”9 Those principles now included a nation free of slavery. As another editorialist explained to readers in the Hartford, Connecticut, area, Southerners “commenced the war to perpetuate slavery” and now “The institution is smitten in the dust, and the chains of the bondmen are broken forever.”10
African Americans in the North had believed this goal to be the war’s purpose from the beginning, and they rejoiced in the defeat of the Confederacy. Northern blacks had watched their men put up with insults, fight hard, die, and finally march as conquerors into Confederate cities. Their communities had fought what Frederick Douglass called “a double battle,” one against Southern slavery and another against Northern prejudice.11 By their own efforts, African Americans had won their place as citizens.12
Earlier, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, had prompted widespread celebration among the black communities of the Northern states. There were other hopeful signs during the war. In February 1865, Illinois repealed its black codes excluding black immigrants and court testimony against whites. As the Reverend A. T. Hall declaimed at a meeting of African Americans in Chicago, “The Legislature were the instrument in the hands of God of wiping out the records of injustice. The status of the colored race had become materially changed.”13 Now, African Americans expected to secure victory in the home front war acknowledged by Douglass, with the help of their white allies.14 As one black Ohio veteran affirmed, “We will not revert to these acts of oppression again,” while a comrade in another black regiment proclaimed, “liberty and equality have been purchased at too great a sacrifice” to be lost in the peace.15
Northern blacks, however, were cautious in victory. In Kentucky and Delaware, their brethren remained enslaved at the end of the war, although the Harrisburg blacks assured those unfortunates that “the rod of your oppressors will eventually be smitten by the omnipotence of truth . . . the fires of freedom shall light your hill tops, and your valleys shall be made vocal with the songs of liberty.”16 The Thirteenth Amendment, which assured the constitutional end of slavery, was still making its way through the states as the Union army rolled up the last of the resisting Confederate forces. Therefore, even with the Confederate surrender, African Americans continued to fear that the rebel masters of the South would renew their fight at some future time, much to the detriment of black people.17
Contemplating the celebrations he expected would sweep the nation, Cornelius Madden reminded his father that he had predicted that the war would make Lincoln “a second Washington in the history of our beloved country and thank God we have lived to see that Solved completely.”18 However, Washington had died a natural death in his own bed. That was not to be Lincoln’s fate. As Mary Livermore recalled, “From the height of this exultation the nation was swiftly precipitated to the very depths of despair” when Abraham Lincoln fell to an assassin’s bullet.19
Confederate sympathizer and popular actor John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln on April 14, Good Friday, as the president watched a play at Ford’s Theater in Washington, D.C. The president died the next day, and Northerners’ celebrations turned into mourning ceremonies. The news of the assassination made people “dumb with grief,” but united in their anger and sorrow.20 Furthermore, as black abolitionist Frederick Douglass understood, the assassination was “a stab at Republican institutions.”21
Communities, only recently filled with excitement and joy, now engaged in collective mourning for their martyred president. Easter Sunday, a great day of joy on the Christian calendar, became one of sorrow.22 Sarah Gay, of North Hingham, Massachusetts, attended church services, noting a flag at half-staff and the church “draped in black crape.” “[E]very thing looks mournful,” she reported to her husband, who was still in the army.23 In Burlington, Vermont, “Many stout-hearted men were seen to weep” at a church service and the mourning continued the next day.24
Northerners were already used to mourning, but Lincoln’s death was extraordinary, its impact wide-ranging in part because Lincoln’s reputation had risen to new heights after his 1864 reelection. New Yorker George Templeton Strong wrote only a few days before Lincoln’s death that the president’s “name will be of high account fifty years hence, and for many generations thereafter.”25 Editorialists now eulogized Lincoln, praising him as being second only to George Washington among America’s presidents. “The bullet that pierced the head of President Lincoln touched the heart of the nation,” editorialized the Cincinnati Commercial; “No event since the death of Washington has so filled the land with sorrow.”26
At the same time that people recognized their martyred president’s greatness, they also intimately experienced his death perhaps because of his ordinary, familiar qualities. Ann Eliza Smith, the wife of Vermont’s governor, told her husband, there is a sense of personal loss. . . . Kind merciful man, he will sure find mercy with God.”27 “I felt as tho I had lost a personal friend,” Philadelphian Sidney Fisher noted, “for indeed I have & so has every honest man in the country.”28 As the editorialist in the Kansas Farmer explained, Lincoln’s death brought with it “a real personal sorrow.” In his mind, the shared trials of the war created intimacy between the late president and the people. “Each man,” he wrote, “feels it as a personal bereavement, for we had looked to our President as a personal friend.”29
After the surrender of Lee, people in New York City began to debate the fate of Jefferson Davis, the rebel president. Some of them expressed a desire to hang him “on a sour apple tree.” Others argued for mercy, joining a debate that individuals pursued across the river in New Jersey and elsewhere through the North.30 There remained some Northerners who continued to call for pardoning what Caleb Mills of Indiana called “the rebel rascals.” But citizens across the country joined him in setting aside notions of mercy for the defeated South, now demanding “vindictive justice.”31 The “astounding event” of Lincoln’s assassination stoked those feelings, Mills thought, thus breaking “up the delusion, & opening the eyes of the public to the folly, & madness of such feeling just taking hold of an unreflecting multitude.”32
Frederick Douglass considered the assassination a God-given opportunity for embarking on a harsh Reconstruction.33 Soldiers in the field were preparing to pursue with hard hearts the Confederates who were still under arms.34 But even Northern Democrats would need to be careful. New Jerseyan Emma Randolph assumed all Democrats were somehow accomplices in the assassination. “I feel a stronger hatred than ever for the poor Copperheads,” she explained; “now they have stooped so low as to murder our loved and honored . . . President.”35 Some bitter individuals, sharing Emma Randolph’s feelings, directed their anger at the closest proxies of the moribund Confederacy, all of whom they presumed were connected at least by association to the dastardly act. Victor Klausmeyer believed that tensions ran so high that “even the smallest incident could have led to all the rebel prisoners and rebel-sympathizers having to pay for this crime with their own blood.”36 The mayor of Philadelphia advised all Democrats to display proper symbols of mourning on their homes, “an external mark of respect to the popular sentiment.” Otherwise, he warned them, “he would not be answerable for the consequences.”37
Indeed, there were some remarkable if not widespread examples of grief-fueled violence. Northerners aimed their vengeance at individuals who did not show proper respect for the slain president, expressed pleasure in his death, or cheered for Jefferson Davis.38 Cincinnatians besieged Junius Brutus Booth, Jr., the assassin’s brother, in his hotel.39 Indianans in Middletown tarred and feathered a man “who expressed his gratification” with the assassination, while New Yorker Unionists tarred a house on Fifth Avenue for “having not been put in mourning.”40 Clevelanders beat a man who suggested that Lincoln “ought to have been shot long ago.”41 They also chased from the city a prominent local architect, J.J. Husband, for the same sin, and then chiseled away his name from the cornerstone of the county courthouse that he had designed.42
Across the land outraged citizens attacked known Copperheads, indiscreet men who cheered Jefferson Davis, and imprudent paroled Confederates in ragged uniforms whose offense was to be on the streets in the only clothes they owned; they also destroyed antiadministration presses.43 Newspaper editors soon urged calm, and called for angry people to let the law take its course.44 Northerners, however, would have their blood satisfaction in learning that soldiers killed Booth as he was attempting to make his escape through Virginia and that later in the summer the government hanged four of his accomplices while sending four more conspirators to prison.45
On April 19, the day of Lincoln’s funeral in Washington, shops and schools closed across the North. Citizens staged funeral processions and black-clothed figures crowded into churches decorated with portraits of Lincoln to attend memorial services, walking past lowered flags and buildings draped in black crepe, listening to tolling bells.46 Northerners unable to pay their respects to Lincoln in Washington did so at stops in cities along the funeral train’s route to Springfield, Illinois, Lincoln’s final resting place. As many as one million Northerners passed Lincoln’s open casket before the president was interred on May 4. Northerners unable to attend formal viewings lit bonfires and gathered to pray along the funeral train’s route while farmers doffed hats as the cars passed by their fields. Springfield, Illinois, was host to tens of thousands of visiting mourners, many of them arriving on overburdened special trains, many of them unable to find places to stay, and many of them passing through the statehouse and in front of the catafalque only to return the same day by waiting trains. But even as they mourned and demanded justice for the heinous act, Northerners attempted to make sense of Lincoln’s martyrdom. Many could not fail to acknowledge the proximity of Lincoln’s death to Good Friday and Easter: a victim of fanaticism bred by slavery, he died to atone for the nation’s sins.47
The Reconstruction that many Northerners believed to be essential for securing victory would require a continued display of the power of the federal government in the defeated Confederate states. However, soldiers and their families, as well as a government and its taxpayers hard pressed by the war’s cost, thought there would be no need for it. Disbanding of the victorious armies was first and foremost an obvious sign of the shift to peace, and the government pursued it with vigor. In June 1865, the War Department mustered out Maine’s remaining coast guard companies, an admission that the threat of ocean raids had ended.48 It was a small event, but still a sign of the return to peace. However, it was the Grand Review that most prominently signaled an end to the need to defend the nation from rebels. On May 23 and 24, a crowd of people in Washington saw first-hand evidence of victory and the nation’s desire to return to peaceful business when it witnessed over 150,000 soldiers parade on Pennsylvania Avenue. The war was certainly over, and the volunteers wished to go home as soon as possible.49 Civilians who witnessed the two-day parade, however, also learned that demobilization had its risks. Men from Sherman’s western regiments fought with men from the eastern Potomac army; men from both armies raucously celebrated their survival; and there were disturbances involving soldiers on their way home.50 Despite these incidents, many Northerners probably agreed with Samuel Cormany, who believed that he and his fellow soldiers “will be better citizens” because of their wartime experiences.51
Consequently, cities feted the returning heroes. Governors and mayors made speeches, communities staged parades, and families engaged in their own personal celebrations that “were next to heavenly,” even while confidence men, pickpockets, “agents and bad women played their arts on unwary” soldiers lingering in camps or walking city streets.52 When Samuel Cormany returned home in August 1865, his wife Rachel rejoiced. “Joy to the world,” she proclaimed in her diary, “I am no more a war widow—My Precious is home safe from the war.”53 There would remain personal problems and economic issues as veterans adjusted, but their transition to civilian status was a process, not an event, that proved ultimately to be a successful one for most men.54
The federal government had final say concerning which regiments would make their way home and when they would do so. However, just as states had raised troops, they also involved themselves in aspects of the demobilization process. New Jersey’s Governor Marcus Ward visited his state’s soldiers in Virginia on several occasions to help hurry their demobilization.55 Other governors contacted the War Department to speed along the mustering out of their home regiments.56 Connecticut provided transportation for its soldiers, assisted them with their records, and helped them secure back pay, bounties, and pensions.7 Governors also performed the politically essential task of receiving regimental flags from returning regiments, offering words of praise to the men as they did so; they also wisely sponsored some sort of celebration for the regiments, at least in the early days of the summer of 1865. 8
All told, 800,963 men left the volunteer army before the middle of November 1865, with reductions continuing into the next year.59 In July 1866, Congress reorganized the army, reducing its size to 54,302 men, with further reductions not far off in the future.60 For a time, thousands of African Americans remained on duty because of their later enrollment dates and thousands of soldiers remained in the old Confederacy, but their numbers would not be sufficient to stem the growing stand against the government’s Reconstruction measures there. The last of the volunteers went home at the end of 1867, while the regular army shifted its attention westward.61 Soon most of the reorganized regular army still in the rebel South was on duty in Texas dealing with Native Americans, not intransigent ex-Confederates.62
Within weeks of Lee’s surrender, on April 29, 1865, the Quartermaster-General’s office stopped spending money at a pace required by war. Orders went out to discharge chartered ships and “all ocean transports not required to bring home troops in remote departments”; suspend all but essential railroad construction; stop buying horses, mules, and wagons; and end any construction of barracks or hospitals, unless most essential.63 This one department reflected the larger governmental desire to reduce its wartime budgets as quickly as possible. The president and Congress now exercised postwar frugality, with Congress enthusiastically reducing military expenditures through its Joint Select Committee on Retrenchment.64
With a smaller reorganized professional military, the federal government no longer needed its hospitals, rendezvous camps, prisoner-of-war camps, and mustering out facilities, not to mention its civilian suppliers. Thus, landscapes once made over for war began to return to their normal peaceful purposes. Shortly after the end of the war, a New York City recruiting depot near City Hall returned to parkland and during the summer, the federal government began to liquidate property in the city, including horses that ended up pulling city streetcars.65 In Indiana, by 1868 the fairgrounds at Indianapolis that had become Camp Morton returned to its original peacetime purpose, although the military had denuded the land of its trees. Officials sold off the buildings, and the city did its best to restore the property to its previous recreational purpose; the federal government eventually made good on almost $10 million in damages to the grounds.66 Camp Randall at Madison, Wisconsin, disappeared as people bought up the wood from its demolished buildings. Towns and cities, once centers of military activity enlivened by the novel society engendered by the regiments and once disrupted by the bad behavior of some of the men in their ranks, returned to their old routines.67
In upstate New York at Elmira, officials released Confederate prisoners, dismantled entire buildings, and sold surplus material to the locals. All traces of the military post and prisoner of war camp were gone by the end of the year.68 The process of dismantling the infrastructure of war repeated itself across the Northern states as soldiers and prisoners made their way home. By the middle of July, for example, property at Ohio’s Camp Chase was on the auction block, its only worthwhile attraction for buyers being the windows in its buildings; the structures eventually found new use as fencing for the final resting place of its dead inmates.69 In December 1865, officials sold off the buildings at Chicago’s Camp Douglas. The property ended up in private hands, and the city eventually grew over the site.70
After the spring of 1865, the army, no longer fighting bloody battles, did not require its extensive system of military hospitals. During the war, the government had developed a network of general hospitals away from the battlefields with a capacity of 136,000 beds.71 At the end of June 1865, there were still 204 general hospitals caring for over 71,000 soldier-patients and while a few of them continued operating after the war, most of them discharged their patients and closed down.72 As with military camps, the government went about shedding the unnecessary property. A few hospitals remained in service for the regular army, but others were sold, dismantled, or set to other purposes. The government shut down Philadelphia’s Satterlee Hospital in August 1865 and by the end of September had auctioned off anything of value.73 By the end of 1865, Keokuk, Iowa’s Estes House hospital returned to peaceable use and in 1866 was home to various businesses.74 The government planned to shutter Madison’s Harvey Hospital, but Cordelia Harvey was able to turn it into a soldiers’ orphans’ home, a purpose it fulfilled until it closed in 1874.75 Otherwise, with few exceptions, the army’s general hospitals shared Satterlee Hospital’s fate.
Elsewhere, officials shed all types of burdensome property once considered essential for the war effort. The War Department quickly sold off the extensive network of telegraph lines it had required for conducting the war, discharging most of the civilian employees who had operated it.76 Within a couple of months of war’s end, the Brooklyn Navy Yard was crowded with ships on the market.77 The Ordnance Department eventually sold off millions of dollars worth of weaponry that found its way to the French, Turks, and private concerns, some of which had originally provided guns to the government during the war. By the early 1870s, the army’s Quartermaster Department, which had spent over $1 billion during the war years to produce a winning military, had supervised the sale of materiel worth about $66 million, including various items ranging from those ships, telegraph lines, and weapons to blankets and shirts.78
If the government no longer needed these military resources, it no longer needed the bureaucracy that had supervised their care once it had divested itself of the surplus. At the outset of the war, the entire executive branch of the federal government employed under 1,300 clerical staff.79 Over the course of the war, the bureaucracy had grown to accommodate the movement of reams of paper, including the multiple copies of military documents of which the War Department was so fond as well as documentation dealing with new taxes and pensions for veterans.80 Before war’s end, the Quartermaster’s Department alone employed 100,000 civilians nationwide.81 By late April, according to clerk Victor Klausmeyer, the War Department had already begun the process of “winding things up” with its “expenditures . . . to be reduced as quickly and as much as possible.”82
In early May, Klausmeyer was among the discharged government clerks. The Quartermaster’s Department quickly cast off thousands of superfluous workers, reducing its civilian workforce to 4,000 within a few years after the surrender. Other departments did the same, and the government continued the reduction into the near future.83 Redundant government workers would need to find places elsewhere, as did Klausmeyer. The unemployed clerk improved his circumstances by marrying a widow and establishing a successful insurance business in Baltimore, undoubtedly taking advantage of the presence of a large German population.84
The government also rid itself of civilian workers who had helped produce the stuff of war. The Brooklyn Navy Yard immediately reduced its workforce by 600 men, followed by 2,000 terminations at the end of the year.85 The armory in Springfield, Massachusetts, had employed 2,300 workers during the war; when peace came, the government sacked all but 300 of them.86 However, the government had no intention of disarming the nation and the Springfield Armory adapted. The armory met the War Department’s wish to alter muzzle-loading rifles turning them into breechloaders; it soon employed 500 men necessary for supplying a modernizing force with new weapons.87 Furthermore, the Ordnance branch of the War Department concerned itself with having proper facilities for storing powder and arms, the continued production of gun carriages for coastal defense, and the further development of reliable rifled cannon.88
In some areas, such rapid demobilization placed a strain on the once booming wartime economy. Soldiers worried about their prospects, prompting government and private citizens to do what they could for them. New York City, for example, established job registries that connected veterans and employers and in 1866 and 1867, William Oland Bourne sponsored left-handed writing contests for amputee veterans in order to prove their competence at clerical work.89 Milwaukee, Wisconsin, philanthropists established an employment agency in anticipation of the needs of returning men.90
Soldier Taylor Peirce’s wife promised him that “There is all sorts of work to do here and plenty of money to pay for it with so I feel confident thee will find something to do if thee is only well enough to work when thee gets home.” Peirce was especially anxious about his prospects. His brother-in-law, looking out for family, had already found the veteran a job in an insurance company, but the veteran ended up making his livelihood as an engineer.91 Some young soldiers, hardly adults when the war began, started new lives from scratch, purchasing land, going to school, marrying, and attempting to find domestic tranquility. Older farmers returned to their properties and tried to reconstruct normal lives for themselves and their families, while others sold land, moved about looking for better prospects, and reestablished themselves in new communities.92 Indeed, after the war not only veterans but also Americans in general were on the move within and between states, a process that had always been part of the country’s nature. New opportunities out West, despite its dangers, had great appeal and would absorb the free-labor ideology as well as the people of the reunited nation.93
If the government no longer needed its army, it no longer needed the manufacturing capacity to supply such a large fighting force. Weapons producers, textile mills, and other manufacturers now weaned themselves off their wartime government contracts.94 As a consequence, Connecticut’s industries cut payrolls, its ports suffered from a decline in trade, and the state’s residents coped with inflation.95 Economic troubles, however, varied throughout the North and hobbled different sectors of the economy in different ways. Successful businesses, towns, and individuals adapted to new circumstances, doing what was necessary to meet the economic challenges of peace. The Ames Manufacturing Company of Chicopee, Massachusetts, which was particularly famous for its swords, had increased its workforce to meet government contracts for cannon. After the war, while sword manufacturing continued, it eventually found profit in making bicycles.96 In early 1866, Camden, Maine, eager to encourage business within its boundaries, provided a substantial incentive to an anchor factory and iron works with a five-year municipal tax exemption.97
Springfield, Massachusetts, experienced a decline in the labor force at its armory, but investment and innovation kept people working.98 New Bedford, Massachusetts, developed a thriving textile industry in the aftermath of the war that replaced the whaling industry as its economic engine of growth. In 1866, Wamsutta Mills was running at full capacity to meet demand.99 Postwar Connecticut, despite its war production setbacks, gained new positions in the insurance industry.100 Individuals also remade themselves in the wake of war, finding new opportunities in businesses, professions, and politics, areas in which they had not engaged before the war, as well as in new places where the opportunities presented themselves.101 In Dubuque, Iowa, there was a growing demand for skilled factory workers, which appeared to suit the returning veterans, now well trained in the discipline required by such work.102 In the St. Paul and Minneapolis region of Minnesota, the economy did very well after the war, as migrants moved into the state; in 1866 the area’s railroad men built their businesses, sparking additional economic growth.103
Workers associated with the United States Sanitary Commission anticipated the end of the war months before Lee’s surrender. But even with victory there remained work to do. As the army mustered out its volunteer forces, there were soldiers in the ranks who required the help of the United States Sanitary Commission. Returning veterans also placed demands on it and other charitable organizations.104 Soldiers’ Rests, common along veterans’ travel routes, provided places for men to pause in their journeys, but with the completion of military demobilization these oases, after tending to tens of thousands of homeward bound men, would soon become unnecessary.105
As late as May and June 1865, Chicago was home to a second successful Northwest Sanitary Fair, raising money to help soldiers and their families and to pay organizational bills. It was a remarkable way with which to wrap up the wartime sanitary fair phenomenon. The fair outstripped the earlier event in that city with its size, sophisticated organization, and attractions, which included popularity contests for generals and Chicago belles—voters paid a dollar for each ballot cast—and the sale of pictures of the Eighth Wisconsin’s “somewhat rapacious” eagle mascot, Old Abe.106
A parade opened the Chicago festivities on May 30 as well as an oration by Governor Richard Oglesby that celebrated the accomplishments of the Northwestern Sanitary Branch of the Sanitary Commission. The governor also reminded his listeners, “The object for which these wonderful labors have been chiefly performed has substantially passed away.” The nation had suppressed the rebellion, and “The soldiers of liberty, the brave, noble, scar-worn soldiers are returning home, to be citizens again and soldiers no longer.”107 The fair netted $300,000, but as the governor suggested, it was an exclamation mark at the end of a wartime movement that had amused and distracted many citizens while allowing them to do good in crisis times.108
Eleemosynary work ranging from housing and educating soldiers’ orphans to helping former soldiers find work or secure pensions began during the war and continued after its end.109 As the nation returned to peace, however, the great wartime philanthropic organizations demobilized just as the War Department was doing. They collected, organized, and bundled their records and eventually shuttered their doors. During July and August 1865, the Woman’s Central Relief Association ended its work and closed its offices; other associations eventually followed.110 The United States Christian Commission, which during the war had worked to keep soldiers faithful to their Christian beliefs, formally concluded its business with a meeting in February 1866.111
In July 1865, the United States Sanitary Commissioner issued a circular alerting its affiliates that the time to end was at hand, a significant task indeed given the thousands of associated aid societies and the several branches it had established in major Northern cities. During the fall of 1865, it maintained some staff to deal with outstanding business, but it was time to sell off property and balance the books.112 It lingered on into the next decade, when in 1878 it completed tending to its records. It finally shut down once and for all in early January 1879, but with the end of the war, its grand purpose had already passed.113
As Mary Livermore later recounted, the wartime experiences of women had taught them the restrictions placed on their lives by male patriarchy. Consequently, as Georgeanna Woolsey Bacon noted, women who had learned to value their own efforts and abilities during the war “were not willing to fold their useful hands when the war was over, and let the old order of things reestablish itself.”114 She and her sisters Abby and Jane remained active in eleemosynary work and especially in the developing nursing profession.115 Other white middle-class women as well as Northern black women ventured south to teach freedpeople, taking advantage of a unique experience created by the end of slavery.116 Even so, Northern women activists came to resent the fact that their male wartime associates slighted their causes while concentrating on advancing black rights.117
With the end of slavery, it appeared as if William Lloyd Garrison and other abolitionists had achieved their ultimate goal. Garrison’s demobilization of the antislavery movement, or at least what was immediately under his control, meant the termination of his seminal abolitionist paper, The Liberator. He expected that the Thirteenth Amendment would become part of the Constitution, rendering his American Anti-Slavery Society a success and consequently an anachronism.118 The organization would be as Garrison said, “an anomaly, a solecism, an absurdity to maintain an anti-slavery society after slavery is dead.”119 Garrison believed the rhetoric and tactics used to attack slavery during the war would not be effective or appropriate in dealing with the postwar issues involving the freedpeople and their advancement. In May 1865, at the meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society he proposed to end its existence, but failed to carry the day. That day would come on April 9, 1870, after the states ratified the Fifteenth Amendment, an achievement that came in part because its membership believed such a goal was an important one.120
In the spring of 1865, Garrison did not propose to ignore the needs of the ex-slaves.121 As indicated by some of the successes of Reconstruction, white abolitionists did not abandon working for greater rights for blacks when the war ended.122 Their Northern black allies, however, better understood the complexities and the vagaries of freedom that required continued and constant efforts to overcome obstacles founded on deeply held white racial prejudice. Not only did they expect a better world for their brethren in the South, but also for African Americans in the North that placed them on par with their white neighbors, especially in the political arena.
For men such as Charles Lenox Remond and Frederick Douglass, the end of the war and the eventual confirmation of emancipation with the Thirteenth Amendment were opening acts, with much more drama yet to come. Attitudes of whites, for one thing, had to change. At the May 1865 meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society, Remond argued that the needs of the ex-slaves certainly came within the purview of the society. Furthermore, Remond maintained, the abolition of slavery did not mean the nation accepted African Americans as the equals of white citizens.123
Frederick Douglass, also at the May meeting, argued, “Slavery is not abolished until the black man has the ballot.” Understanding the power to make law would be the power to define freedom, Douglass presciently continued: “Legislatures of the South retain the right to pass laws making any discrimination between black and white, slavery still lives there.” Garrison’s society was obligated to tend to this goal as part of its mission. Southerners would oblige the law and even the new constitutional amendment when it passed through the states, but slavery would continue. “They would not call it slavery,” he advised, “but some other name.” Indeed, he warned, “you and I and all of us had better wait and see what new form this old monster will assume, in what new skin this old snake will come forth next.”124
Douglass remained well aware of the shortcomings of law when confronted with entrenched racism.125 In the aftermath of the war, even as politicians advanced the cause of African Americans in the North and South with legislation and constitutional amendments, problems persisted in the victorious states. In August 1865, African Americans in Evansville, Indiana, were victims of a race riot and Democrats in the state vocally opposed equal rights for them, considering such a move the ushering into the state a “calamity,” according to one editorialist, degrading white laboring men while “compelling . . . [them] to become worse than a slave.”126 Also shortly after the war, New Jersey Democrats made it clear that they still expected the political process to be reserved to whites and, despite some dissenters, even Republicans in that state reassured voters that black suffrage was not on their immediate postwar agenda.127 Across the North, African Americans continued to find white men standing in opposition to their claim of the franchise, as well as all other basic rights.128 African Americans understood that freedom won was not freedom secured, that even in victory there still remained a battle before them.
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The Northern home front emerged from the war not so much as a new place and people, but as a renewed society still confronting the challenges connected to the war’s legacy. The region had escaped the physical devastation that its enemies had endured, and therefore did not have the proximate evidence of what the war did to the landscape, society, and the economy. Victory had reinforced the people’s sense of mission, giving them a confidence in their abilities to solve future problems. Within the war generation’s lifetime, cemeteries, monuments, parades, and the veterans themselves would all serve as the region’s physical reminders of what Northerners had accomplished. But they also would act as the reminders of what a virtuous republic could accomplish and what a great nation should be.
Most Northerners were happy to get on with their lives. However, as African Americans understood in 1865, the war was as much a beginning as it was a conclusion, or at least it was a dramatic milestone in the life of a nation always in the process of striving to meet the promises laid out in its founding documents. Words such as “freedom” and “equality” took on new meanings as laws and constitutional amendments reminded the nation that slavery had died and that the black population expected to take an active part in guiding the future of the reunited nation. Rebuilding the erstwhile Confederacy, settling new Western lands, dealing with new industrial enterprises, exploring new roles beyond the old national boundaries, and welcoming hundreds of thousands of strangers into the country meant dealing with a multitude of concerns all in some way related to the blessings of a united nation and in many ways issued challenges to black and white Americans. The question then became how victorious Northerners would shift their attentions to these tests while striving to preserve the fruits of victory, how they would help the nation to maintain the purpose and the promise of the democratic government they had sacrificed so much to save.