The violent aftermath of the Civil War comes to dramatic life in this sweeping new collection of firsthand writingThere are few periods in American history more consquential but less understood than Reconstruction, the tumultuous twelve years after Appomattox, when the battered nation sought to reconstitute itself and confront the legacy of two centuries of slavery. This Library of America anthology brings together more than one hundred contemporary letters, diary entries, interviews, petitions, testimonies, and newspaper and magazine articles by well-known figures—Frederick Douglass, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Andrew Johnson, Thaddeus Stevens, Ulysses S. Grant, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Mark Twain, Albion Tourgée—as well as by dozens of ordinary men and women, black and white, northern and southern, to tell the story of our nation's first attempt to achieve racial equality. Through their eyes readers experience the fierce contest between President...