President Lincoln had established a Freedmen’s Bureau to help people who’d been held in bondage become people with tools to make a living on their own. His generals had offered reparations—forty acres and a mule, carved out of land seized from more than 70,000 slaveholders. But his successor, Andrew Johnson, had overturned the order just a few months after Lincoln was assassinated. The task of peace, as Walt Whitman had prophesied, would be more difficult than the war itself.
