Abraham Lincoln was a Republican and president of the United States from 1861 until April 1865. The American Civil War began during his tenure when southern states seceded from the US and formed the Confederacy. In 1862, he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed enslaved people living in the rebellious states. The process of Reconstruction began under Lincoln and while the war was ongoing. After his reelection to a second term in 1865, Congress ratified the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery throughout the nation. Later that year, a Confederate loyalist named John Wilkes Booth assassinated Lincoln at Ford’s Theater in Washington, DC.

Albion Tourgée was a Union veteran and writer who critiqued the nostalgic and romanticized “plantation school” of southern literature that emerged in the late 1800s. An emancipationist view of the Civil War characterizes his work, with Tourgeé believing that “the war’s meaning and responsibility were […] sacrificed on the altar of reunion” (219).

Booker T. Washington was an African American academic, author, and orator who was born into enslavement in the South but was freed when the Emancipation Proclamation was issued. He favored a reconciliationist