While hostilities between North and South might have officially ended in July of 1854, unofficially sporadic skirmishes between Union troops and isolated bands of Confederate foot soldiers would continue until early October. The last Confederate naval vessel would not even strike its colors until it reached the coast of Great Britain on March 2nd, 1855-- nearly nine months after the Confederate government’s final surrender. But for the most part, the Confederate Republic of America was effectively dead, with much of its leadership either in prison or on the run from the victorious federal government in Washington. Among those who’d fled rather than submit themselves to the Union’s judgment following the CRA’s collapse was Secretary of State Judah P. Benjamin, who escaped Charleston shortly before the final Confederate surrender and would spend most of the rest of his life in Europe practicing law and writing memoirs that portrayed the Confederate Republic not as the aggressor in the Southern Rebellion War but as the victim.

For President Millard Fillmore, two of the critical tasks facing his administration now that the war was finally over were figuring out what to do with those Southern leaders who were in federal custody and rebuilding the war-torn South. A third was deciding when to submit to Congress his proposal for a constitutional amendment officially ending slavery in the United States. The third task proved the easiest one to achieve: with the delegations of the Southern states still absent from Congress and abolitionist feeling at its peak in the Northern states, there was nothing to stand in the way of the amendment’s passage, and accordingly it sailed through the Senate and House of Representatives just three months after the final Confederate surrender. By October of 1854 eleven state legislatures had ratified what is now known as “the Fillmore Amendment” and two others were on the verge of ratification. The last vestiges of institutional slavery were being dismantled, and most Americans on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line were happy to see it go.

One Southern leader whose fate Fillmore wouldn’t have to spend much time deciding was John C. Breckenridge, Alexander H. Stephens’ vice-president in the final days of the Confederate Republic. Just three weeks after the final Confederate surrender Breckenridge, in a bout of despair over his beloved South’s defeat in the war against the Union, had committed suicide by swallowing a lethal dose of what was later determined to be arsenic. Under the watchful eyes of Union occupation troops Breckenridge was laid to rest in his local church cemetery; some modern American historians have called him “the final casualty of the Southern Rebellion”.

Knowing that rebuilding the South’s industrial and transportation infrastructure was critical to accomplishing the goal of bringing the formerly rebellious Southern states back into the Union, Fillmore went before Congress in November of 1854 to propose a massive federal works program aimed at restoring war-damaged factories, roads, bridges, rail lines, and harbor facilities. His proposals were the initial basis for what would later be known as “the Great Reconstruction”. There were a number of objections raised to Fillmore’s proposals; some Congressmen felt the South should be kept de-industrialized and subjugated forever while many others worried the price of implementing Fillmore’s program would further drain the already sharply diminished American treasury. But Abraham Lincoln made a highly convincing case on Fillmore’s behalf for the “Great Reconstruction”, using all the rhetorical skills he’d developed during his legal career and his 1852 run for the U.S. Senate to argue that investing in the Reconstruction was well worth any short term financial hardship it might inflict.

In the end Congress passed the 1854 Southern Reconstruction Act by a comfortable(if just a bit narrower than President Fillmore would have liked) margin; by early January of 1855 the first contingents of laborers and businessmen had begun arriving by horseback and carriage to set to work on the task of rebuilding the South and its economy. In popular slang, these new arrivals would soon be dubbed by native-born Southerners as “carpetbaggers” because of the huge carpet suitcases a great number of the newcomers carried with them. Originally meant as a way of poking fun at perceived Northern pretentiousness, the word soon became a pejorative phrase used to protest these outsiders’ assumption of control over the South’s political, social, and economic life.

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One of the great unanswered questions facing America after the Southern Rebellion War ended was the matter of whether former slaves were entitled to claim economic compensation from their ex-masters or those masters’ estates. In May of 1856, just under two years after the signing of the Fort Sumter peace treaty, the compensation issue became the focus of the most contentious case the U.S. Supreme Court had thus far heard in the United States’ eighty-year history. That month an ex- slave named Dred Scott, who’d deserted his plantation to fight on the Union side during the war, petitioned the federal government to grant him compensation for lost wages his master had stolen from him during his years in bondage. Attorneys representing the estate of Scott’s ex- master argued Scott’s claim was invalid under existing federal law and asserted that even if it were valid their client had no method at all of fulfilling it since the war had wiped out all but a fraction of the client’s assets. Such claims incensed William Lloyd Garrison, Scott’s principal ally in his suit against his former master; he was convinced the defendants were intentionally trying to hide money from Scott as a way of keeping him from getting the compensation he deserved.

In his capacity as publisher of The Liberator, Garrison used the power of the press to demand a full account of how much money Scott’s ex-master still had and to advocate the creation of an organization to assist former slaves in acclimating to new lives as free men and women regardless of what the Supreme Court decided in the Scott case. In his role as a social reformer he rallied many of his old comrades from the days of the abolition movement to join him in the fight to secure what he and Scott’s other supporters viewed as just compensation for all of the miseries Scott had endured during his slave days.

Garrison also recruited former businessman-turned-antislavery activist-turned nationally renowned author John Brown to gather more allies for Scott’s crusade. During the Southern Rebellion War Brown, a committed abolitionist since at least the mid-1830s, had fought with distinction in a New York infantry brigade, and in the war’s immediate aftermath he’d earned a reputation for writing passionate, stark prose in defense of the cause of giving freed blacks full U.S. citizenship. His thick beard and fiery rhetoric made him resemble an Old Testament prophet in the eyes of supporters and foes alike-- and to be sure this wasn’t an entirely inaccurate comparison, given that religious values shaped much of Brown’s worldview. In fact, Brown himself was quick to point out that the Bible had been a seminal influence on his attitudes toward slavery before and during the Southern Rebellion. And even now, long after the war had ended, it continued to motivate Brown to put up a fight against the last surviving legal vestiges of slavery.

It would take almost a year for the U.S. Supreme Court to issue a ruling on Scott’s petition. But when that ruling finally came down, it would have a dramatic impact on the course of American history and inspire the creation of the forerunner of the modern U.S. civil rights movement. On April 16th, 1857, by a razor-thin margin of 5-4, the court ruled that Scott was, in fact, entitled to compensation for lost wages but that his former master’s estate couldn’t be held legally liable to make restitution on such claims since its assets had been almost fully wiped out by the war. This ruling left Scott’s advocates baffled and highly disappointed by its inherent contradictions; they soon rallied from their disappointment, however, and commenced a new crusade on the ex-slave’s behalf that climaxed in October of 1857 with the signing by President Fillmore of a new law which created the Freedmen’s Agency, the first federal government bureau established specifically to give economic and social assistance to black Americans. While at the time Fillmore’s action drew heavy criticism from certain people who still harbored notions of black inferiority, today it is regarded as one of the better decisions made by Fillmore during his tenure as President.

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Neither Scott nor John Brown, as it turned out, would live long enough to see the full fruit of their efforts to secure greater legal protection for the rights of African-Americans in the post-Southern Rebellion era. Scott died of tuberculosis on September 17th, 1858; just over a year later Brown was murdered in Harper’s Ferry, Virginia while giving an impassioned speech in defense of the Freedmen’s Agency. It was a measure how much things had changed in the South during the past eight years that when his killer was caught two weeks later, it would be a predominantly Southern jury who convicted the murderer and sent him to the gallows; before the war such a jury would most likely have let the killer off with a light sentence or even given him an outright acquittal, given the extent to which pro-slavery attitudes tended to supersede justice in the pre-Southern Rebellion War years. The verdict in the Brown murder trial was also an early indicator of the gradual transformation in racial attitudes which would in turn transform the American cultural identity over the next century....