“WHAT IS FREEDOM?”:
RECONSTRUCTION
★ CHAPTER 15 ★
1 8 6 5 – 1 8 7 7
FOCUS QUESTIONS
• What visions of freedom did the former slaves and slaveholders pursue in the
postwar South?
• What were the sources, goals, and competing visions for Reconstruction?
• What were the social and political effects of Radical Reconstruction in the
South?
• What were the main factors, in both the North and South, for the abandonment
of Reconstruction?O
n the evening of January 12, 1865, less than a month after Union forces
captured Savannah, Georgia, twenty leaders of the city’s black com-
munity gathered for a discussion with General William T. Sherman
and Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton. Mostly Baptist and Methodist minis-
ters, the group included several men who within a few years would assume
prominent positions during the era of Reconstruction that followed the Civil
War. Ulysses S. Houston, pastor of the city’s Third African Baptist Church, and
James Porter, an episcopal religious leader who had operated a secret school for
black children before the war, in a few years would win election to the Georgia564 ★