aspiring Black families. White men—like those who denied Edward Crosby his vote and rallied the Klan to punish him—mobilized around the belief that, although secessionists had surrendered the battlefield to United States forces, the war to maintain complete mastery over Black people was still on. U.S. Army officials, like General Thomas Kilby Smith, observed that these southern whites were “disloyal in their sentiments and hostile to what they call the United States”; they waited to be “restored to independence” and left to manage Black people just as they had before the war.11
