He was a careful observer, and what he observed in Washington — the mechanics of federal decision-making, the specific points of access and leverage, the human networks through which political outcomes were actually determined — would inform everything he did in the city when he returned to it under very different circumstances two decades later.

The Civil War’s Other Meaning

The Civil War was, among many other things, a war about the nature of American citizenship — about who was included in the American political community, on what terms, and with what rights.

The war’s resolution, and the constitutional amendments that followed it, transformed the formal legal structure of American citizenship in ways that had profound consequences for African Americans.

For Native Americans, the war’s settlement was more ambiguous.