April 1865 was a dangerous time in American history. When the month started, there were still at least three active Confederate armies of varying degrees on strength in the field. Jefferson Davis, the Confederate president, was urging all of them not to surrender and to fight a guerrilla war for as long as it took to ensure Southern independence. Many men, both North and South, had gotten separated from their units either through desertion or due to the chaos of war, and they were armed, hungry, and looting the Southern countryside. Much of the South was in shambles, and many families lost their livestock due to armies seizing draft animals. There were also questions of how would the vanquished Confederate states be brought back into the Union. Radical republicans wanted the South governed as a conquered territory with only the slight possibility of being brought back into the Union fully. Lincoln, on the other hand, wanted the states restored as soon as possible. Had Lincoln not been assassinated, there might have been fights with Congress about how to bring the nation back together. There was also the question of how to treat the Confederate leadership. Radicals in Congress encouraged hanging as the punishment for top Rebels, while Lincoln secretly wanted Davis to leave the country and not come back. The most longstanding problem was the fate of thousands of newly freed slaves. They were emancipated and in many cases taken by the army as contraband, but they were not citizens and could not vote. Racism existed in both the North and the South, and even Lincoln encouraged their expatriation to either Central America or the Caribbean, as he thought it the only way they would be treated fairly. All of these problems were symptoms of a larger problem--the nation had just went through a war that killed over six hundred thousand people, and the leaders did not know how both sides could be reconciled emotionally, even though the South had been defeated on the battlefield.
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