The Thirty-Ninth Congress met as the Civil War ended and fought President Andrew Johnson over the reconstruction of the South. Barnes, writing in 1868, follows its debates step by step: the Joint Committee on Reconstruction, suffrage in the District of Columbia, the Freedmen’s Bureau, civil rights and the Fourteenth Amendment, with long extracts from the speeches.
A detailed near-contemporary record of the Congress that remade the Constitution. Download the free EPUB.