In Lincoln’s last public speech, delivered on a balcony at The White House, on April 11, 1865, and just after news of Robert E. Lee’s surrender to Ulysses S. Grant, he expressed the challenge the broken nation faced: “Reconstruction ... is pressed much more closely upon our attention ... It is fraught with great difficulty. Unlike the case of a war between independent nations, there is no authorized organ for us to treat with ... We simply must begin with, and mould from, disorganized and discordant elements.”

The president’s careful words show his sense of the daunting tasks that lay ahead. “So new and unprecedented is the whole case,” Lincoln said, “that no exclusive, and inflexible plan can safely be prescribed ... [but] important principles ... must be inflexible.” How could Reconstruction policy take the form of flexible plans and inflexible principles? Whose plan, and what principles would prevail? Could American politics ever strike such a balance?

All approaches to Reconstruction had to provide answers to at least three huge questions: One, who would rule in the defeated South (ex-Confederates, white Unionists, black former slaves, Yankees who moved south)? Two, would Congress or the president rule in Washington? Three, what were the dimensions and definitions of black freedom and equality—under law and in human hearts? And on a broad scale, another question encompassed all the others: Would Reconstruction be a preservation of the old, or a remaking of the new? A restoration of the former Confederates to the Union as rapidly as possible, or a second revolution with a constitutional refounding and a remaking of Southern society?

The architects of Reconstruction policies, from the middle of the war down to 1876, included three presidents—Lincoln, Andrew Johnson, and Grant—as well as major Republican politicians such as John Bingham, John Trumbull, William Pitt Fessenden, Thaddeus Stevens, Charles Sumner, and many others. After replacing the murdered Lincoln, Johnson became until 1868, the embodiment of a rapid, lenient vision of Reconstruction, rooted in states’ rights doctrine, white supremacy, and a decidedly non-revolutionary approach to the remaking of the federal Union. The slogan most often associated with Johnson’s vision of Reconstruction, which most white Southerners came to embrace, was “the Union as it was, the Constitution as it is,” which meant a swift reentry to full statehood in the United States, renunciation of secession resolutions, and acceptance of the end of slavery—but no advancement in the civil and political rights of the freedmen.

The “radical” Republicans, however, saw Reconstruction as a necessary process of rooting out the causes of the Southern “rebellion” in the first place, and as an opportunity to forge a new social, legal, and political order. Above all, they were determined to create a truly new nation, and one rooted in at least the beginnings of racial equality in civic and political life.