On April 14, 1865, as President Lincoln watched a performance of "Our American Cousin" at Ford's Theater in Washington, D.C., he was shot by John Wilkes Booth, an actor from Maryland obsessed with avenging the Confederate defeat.

Today we're talking about reconstructing the nation, the aftermath of the Civil War. On April 9th, 1865, General Robert E. Lee of the Confederate Army surrendered his sword to the general of the Union armies, Ulysses S. Grant, near a small courthouse at a place called Appomattox. That brought to an end, officially, the bloodiest war and the most dramatic and traumatic war in American history. In the aftermath of that war, the years between 1865 and roughly 1877, the nation underwent what American historians have referred to as the era of Reconstruction. Many historians would agree that Reconstruction officially came to an end in 1877; I would not. In many ways, the Civil War and the period of Reconstruction is still going on in American history.

Ulysses S. Grant	Appomattox, April 9, 1865	Robert E. Lee

The era of Reconstruction raised three important questions about the United States and its people that we have yet to fully answer. The first of those questions was "can the United States be truly united?" The second was "can black and white Americans coexist peacefully and equally with one another?" The third question was "who runs this country anyway? The president of the United States? The Congress? The Supreme Court? Or, whomever they may be, 'the people'?" If you look up the word "reconstruction" in a dictionary, it means "to build again." Certainly many Southerners preferred that meaning. There were a number of Northerners, however, most of them known as Radical Republicans, who chose to interpret the word in its second dictionary definition, "to build anew." They wanted to change the South's economy, its social system, its methods of race relations. And so, these are the problems that faced the nation in 1865. These problems, at least in my view, still face the nation today.

Certainly, every road that led from that Appomattox courthouse seemed a road to ruin. A Northerner named Carl Schurz, a Wisconsin Republican, one of the earliest supporters and closest friends of Abraham Lincoln, visited the South as a presidential representative in the immediate aftermath of the war. Schurz was a man who had been an abolitionist. He had opposed the institution of slavery. A man who literally hated the South and Southerners. He brought back a mammoth report, one that showed, even for a man who hated the South, a kind of poignant sympathy for the plight and the devastation that the war had wrought. Carl Schurz began his account by describing the Southern countryside leading away from Appomattox, and he had this to say: "The countryside looked for many miles like a broad, black streak of ruin and desolation, the fences all gone, lonesome smokestacks surrounded by dark heaps of ashes and cinders. The fields along the road wildly overgrown by weeds, and here and there a sickly patch of cotton or corn cultivated by Negro squatters." - Carl Schurz

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