During fall 1865, Mississippi elects new government under Andrew Johnson’s policy, and governments in Tennessee, Arkansas, and Louisiana conduct elections and continue the process of Reconstruction. Louisiana Unionists organize into Republican party and advocate black suffrage. Mississippi is first former rebellious state to enact “black code” and to define freedom for the former slaves, prompting protests from black Mississippians, and it refuses to ratify Thirteenth Amendment. African American leaders in Arkansas hold convention in Little Rock calling for political and legal equality. Thirteenth Amendment becomes operative in early December 1865, as Thirty-Ninth Congress convenes. Fears of “Christmas Insurrection Scare” become manifest, though for different reasons, among both black and white Southerners.

The organization of loyal governments on a free-state basis in Tennessee and Arkansas during early 1864. Unionists in Arkansas hold a constitutional convention in January and draft a state constitution prohibiting slavery. Despite logistical challenges, constitution gains approval by voters in Union-held Arkansas in March. In Tennessee, Andrew Johnson formulates plan to hold local elections before holding a state constitutional convention. Johnson’s plan includes a loyalty oath that imposes stricter requirements for voting than Lincoln’s ten-percent plan. Local elections take place and officials began assuming office, but the unsettled military situation in the state forces postponement of the plan to hold a state constitutional convention.

Traditionally, white radical Republicans like Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens have been given the main credit for the work of Reconstruction that culminated with the ratification of the 14th and 15th Amendments. This chapter shifts the focus to consider the work of Frederick Douglass and other Black activists in contesting the racist president Andrew Johnson and applying pressure to the Republicans to bring about the full citizenship and enfranchisement of African Americans. Douglass had a dramatic 1866 meeting with Andrew Johnson in the White House, and he continued to apply pressure to Johnson and the Republicans over the next several years. The chapter considers some of Douglass’s most important Reconstruction writings, including his essays in the Atlantic Monthly, his great 1867 lecture “Sources of Danger to the Republic,” and the 1881 version of his Life and Times of Frederick Douglass.

Most histories of Reconstruction begin their narrative in December 1863 when President Abraham Lincoln announced his Ten Percent Plan, reserving most of the authority to restore the collapsing Confederacy in the executive branch. Frederick Douglass also thought that Reconstruction began in 1863, but in January rather than in December. That month, after the final Emancipation Proclamation was issued, the War Department at long last permitted states to recruit black soldiers, which Douglass believed was the first step toward black citizenship and voting rights. Although Republicans envisioned Reconstruction as a policy only for the Confederacy, Douglass understood that the entire nation required political reclamation. If William Lloyd Garrison and a good number of white abolitionists assumed their struggle concluded with the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in December 1865, Douglass understood that the fight had just begun. He knew that the antithesis of slavery was not freedom, but equality.

Sherita Johnson considers a region much more associated with African Americans in Reconstruction in her “Reconstruction of the South in African American Literature.” Johnson examines the transformations of a place, people, and Black literary tradition(s) responding to the political and cultural conflicts of the era and finds that Elizabeth Keckley, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, William Wells Brown, James Madison Bell, Albery A. Whitman and Pauline Hopkins all present “Black witnesses” to Reconstruction in their works: slaves emancipating themselves, freedmen and women staking claims to Southern homes built by generational struggles, and black citizens enacting the promises of democracy. Ultimately, her chapter provides case studies of diverse texts – travel narratives, epic poems, autobiographical sketches, and moral theatre – to consider how such works by African American writers help to correct the historical record of Reconstruction and of Southern literary history.

This chapter argues that the Fourteenth Amendment deployed the antebellum legal language described in the first three chapters to solve the historical problems described in Chapter 4. It describes the reconstruction legislation of the Thirty-Ninth Congress – the Civil Rights Act of 1866, the Privileges and Immunities Bill of 1866, and the Freedmen's Bureau Act of 1866 – and shows how the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment sought to constitutionalize these pieces of legislation that would have solved the known historical problems of the times.

William H. Williams left behind a wealthy widow, Violet, who soon remarried. Violet Williams Abell navigated the 1862 abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia, applying for compensation for the five bondpeople emancipated under the new law. As administratror of her deceased first husband’s estate, Violet Williams also endured the lingering legal problems associated with the convict slaves purchased from Virginia for transportation outside the country. In 1847, Allison Nailor of Washington, D.C. allegedly purchased an ownership stake in the enslaved convicts whom William H. Williams had carried to New Orleans. He sued the widow Violet Williams Abell to recover his claimed share of the profits from their sale. His case reached the US Supreme Court in 1869, where it was decided against him. The chapter concludes with brief histories of William H. and Violet Williams’ four daughters and their families.