The Shifting Border between War and Peace: The American Civil War from 1865–70

The U.S. Civil War did not end at the famous surrender ceremony at Appomattox Court House, as often portrayed in popular culture, nor even with the more-defensible endpoints of the later surrenders in North Carolina, Texas, and Indian Country.  Nor did the war conclude with President Andrew Johnson’s 1866 proclamations, as the Supreme Court would later rule. Instead, as many lawyers, politicians, and generals said openly at the time, the Civil War endured for more than five years after the rebel surrenders. A period of post-surrender wartime that lasted longer than the battlefield conflict of the war finally concluded in 1871, as Congress curtailed the state of war and the Army closed its final wartime district. 

Thinking of the period between 1865 and 1868 (in six states) and 1870-1871 (in four others) as a continuation of the war reconfigures our understanding of the Civil War, Reconstruction, emancipation, and the uses of war powers to achieve wartime goals. By looking to the endurance of war powers and wartime, we can see the continuous, if strategically varying, fights that white Southerners waged against the United States, the centrality of the post-1865 period for the extermination of a widespread slavery that endured after surrender, and the tangible battle for control of space that would shape the struggle for civil rights in the 19th century South. Rights depended upon proximity to soldiers with the power to enforce them; the struggle to create defensible rights turned then not just upon ideology or legal pronouncements but upon a series of battles meant to create federal authority in the Southern countryside, a struggle over sovereignty that could not be contained in legal rulings but that played out as a series of open conflicts in which insurgents would often prevail.