The following article is part one in a series on the effects of the Civil War in Alabama.

One hundred and fifty years ago, the people of Alabama launched the long political and personal journey back into the union of the United States. After four years of war, unimaginable death and destruction the American Civil War came to an end and the decades-long healing process began. The American south’s political and economic infrastructure lay in ruins as the Federal Government sought a mechanism to realign the former Confederate states and find a place for the hundreds of thousands of newly freed blacks that found themselves with an open ended future. Alabama, like the rest of the post-Confederate south faced years of control by the U.S. Armed Forces and by the federal government as the region was “reconstructed” minus the institution of slavery that had once fueled the Southern economy and thus dictated the politics of the South.

Historians maintain that the Reconstruction Era, in general, lasted from 1865 until 1877, when that year’s presidential election ended the process. Most historians also divide the era into presidential and congressional phases each of which were characterized by the governmental branches that assumed control of the process. During the presidential phase, federal troops were sent to Alabama, and the other former Confederate states, to manage the emancipation of former black slaves and to maintain order. During the second phase, Congress gained control of the process as they pushed Southern states and individuals to meet stringent criteria in order to be fully accepted into the Union.

In Alabama Gen. Wager T. Swayne commanded the Union troops that were part of the Presidential Reconstruction effort. Swayne was a past graduate of Yale University, a lawyer and military commander of the 43rd Ohio Volunteer Regiment during the Civil War. He won the Congressional Medal of Honor for leading a charge at Corinth, Mississippi in 1862. Swayne also lost his right leg at a battle in South Carolina later in the war. The General closely followed the orders set by the Andrew Johnson administration in choosing leniency for the ex-Confederate leaders in the state who reclaimed power after the war. President Johnson’s policies provided the leaders in the South the ability to establish their relationship with the emancipated slaves through the support of an occupying army. His platform included pardons for ex-Confederate leaders, no civil rights protection for black freemen and no extension of voting rights for blacks.

Once in Montgomery, Swayne supported Johnson’s policies, cooperated with the state’s officials and called for the emancipated blacks to go back to work. One of the major tasks appointed to Swayne and the army was to support the activities of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands known, in short, as the Freedmen’s Bureau. Swayne worked closely with Alabama Governor Lewis E. Parsons and his successor Robert M. Patton to enforce the rule of law and accept courts of law that allowed black testimony. At the same time, Swayne agreed to place Alabama officials in charge of the local offices of the Freedmen’s Bureau.

In May 1865, President Andrew Johnson appointed Lewis Parsons provisional governor of Alabama. He remained in office until December of that same year. Prior to becoming Alabama’s governor, Parsons had been an attorney and a state legislator. Born in New York, Parsons moved to Talladega in 1840. There he practiced law while buying and selling property. At the outbreak of the Civil War, he had become a wealthy man though he owned no slaves. Throughout the secession debates within the state, he opposed secession becoming one of the unionists most skilled orators.

Immediately after his appointment, Parsons set about reconstituting the state government through the enforcement of prewar laws and the reinstatement of former Confederate office holders. He called for an election of delegates to rework and adopt the state constitution. In September 1865, the state abolished slavery, repealed secession and disavowed the state’s wartime debt all of which placed the state in line to be accepted back into the Union.