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c h a p t e r t h r e e HOMECOMINGS AND PERSONAL RECONSTRUCTIONS 1865–1868 BBB There is not a colored man who does not understand what he owes to the government of the United States. —C. S. Sauvinet, December 22, 1866 T The last months of the war played cruelly upon E. John Ellis’s mind. Late February of 1865 found him proposing to fight on even if all of the South’s cities and armies had been vanquished. “God knows I am willing to spend my life as a ‘guerilla,’ and ‘outlaw,’ a ‘rebel,’ a ‘traitor,’ or a ‘pirate’ for this cause. . . . I glory in such crimes,” he confided to his diary. Through the month of March, longtime friends left on exchange, but he remained. “Then,” wrote Ellis, “came that stormy Monday when from the prison yard we saw all the flags in Sandusky and heard the chime of a hundred bells faintly borne across the ruffled waters of the bay. What could it mean?” A boat arrived at the island moments later bearing news of the fall of Petersburg and Richmond. News of Lee’s defeat and the surrender of Appomattox spread through the prison camp several days later, casting a sense of gloom and hopelessness among the inmates. The Confederacy’s demise was a transcendent moment for Ellis. “This news thrilled me strangely,” he wrote. “Never before had I entertained a doubt about the final success of our cause. When logic failed or served only to prove that our enemies must triumph at length, I had turned and cast it aside and through its mists shone bright and pure the star of faith. I had blindly worshiped it and beneath its rays I had built a temple to the successful revolution. The star is dim and the temple in ruins.”1 Although prison had hardened him in some important ways, Ellis retained his devotion to Victorian notions of honor, a sensibility that had only been reinforced by military service. As May became June, the barracks in which he stayed held H o m e c o m i n g s a n d P e r s o n a l R e c o n s t r u c t i o n s 53 fewer and fewer inmates, and many of the holdouts were fellow Louisianians who had voluntarily entered a pact not to take the oath until the Trans-Mississippi’s army surrendered. In a prison that once held twenty-eight hundred soldiers, there were, by his estimates, only about one hundred thirty-five men left. Writing to his father back in Louisiana, Ellis proclaimed: “There is no blood on my hands. Had the war terminated favorably to the South I would have always thought that we were right in opposing secession.” Satisfied that he had maintained his honor to the end, he took the “hated and accursed” oath on June 13, 1865. Less than three weeks later, on the Fourth of July, he arrived home at Amite, where he expected “to stay a white man.”2 The inner-directed and personal nature of Ellis’s concerns contrasts sharply with the manner in which historians of Reconstruction have often portrayed the postbellum era’s political and social chaos. Although interpretations of the period have changed dramatically in the past century, from the vitriolic diatribes of the “Dunning School,” to the apologia of the revisionists, to the more nuanced approach of the postrevisionists, most narratives still condense Reconstruction down to a struggle waged by competing group identities. Drawing upon a fund of familiar stereotypes, they recount how unreconstructed rebels brought about a white supremacist millennium by overthrowing Republican state governments run by flawed but usually well-meaning carpetbaggers and their scalawag and freedmen allies. Even more recent biographical works, usually of prominent Republicans , add little personal dimension beyond their immediate subject. To arrive at a deeper understanding of Reconstruction, we need to take a closer look at the private challenges that the Civil War generation faced during the tumultuous postbellum period, a line of inquiry that the historical field has only begun to engage. Partisan allegiance and regional identity often merely lent shape to the inner struggle faced by Reconstruction’s actors.3 The unprecedented nature of the postbellum era’s political challenges had an important parallel in the private lives of countless men and women who had just endured four years of an “unhappy war,” and nowhere was...

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