
In the months after Appomattox, the South was plunged into a chaos that surpassed even the disorder of the last hard months of the war itself. Peace brought, if anything, an increased level of violence to the region as local authorities of the former Confederacy were stripped...

Dan T. Carter's When the War Was Over is a social and political history of the two years following the surrender of the Confederacy - the so-called period of Presidential Reconstruction when the South, under the watchful gaze of Congress and the Union army, attempted to rebuild...