Chapter 4 focuses on the importance of the Freedmen’s Bureau. Using Albion Tourgée’s 1883 novel Bricks without Straw, Oliver Otis Howard’s account of his time as director of the Freedmen’s Bureau, and archival records of the Bureau itself, the novel is read as a fictional reenactment of the work of Reconstruction. Bricks without Straw features two male protagonists, one Black, one white. The emancipated Nimbus lives in Red Wing, a self-sustaining Black-owned Southern community. Hesden Le Moyne, the scion of the leading family in town, is a Union sympathizer but is pressured to join the Confederate Army and loses his left arm in battle. Hesden returns from the war both a pacifist and an abolitionist. In the novel, amputation forces readers to focus on the present and move beyond the past, in recognition that the past of the intact body is irrecoverable. The past of a South organized around the enslavement and exploitation of Black Americans is buried, like Hesden’s lost arm, discarded in favor of a future that puts Black self-determination at its core. Moreover, Black and white characters work together to create a postwar nation organized around racial equality and justice.

Administrative conflict and confusion between Federal military and civil authorities in southern Louisiana in overseeing plantations, as preparations made for 1865. Sugar planters reiterate demand for labor and racial control with slavery abolished. Some former slaveholders express view that slavery might be salvaged. Planters and freedpeople in cotton region also contest features of new labor and racial order. Following Confederate capitulation in the west, Federal military forces assume control of entire lower Mississippi valley and emancipate enslaved people still under Confederate authority. Freedmen’s Bureau begins to establish itself and to institute free labor arrangements. White Southerners respond to military defeat and the end of slavery with anger and violence, and many vow that slavery will be reestablished once Federal military presence ends.

Robert Penn Warren produced in the early 1950s a classic portrait of New Orleans during the 1860s, particularly during its occupation by Union troops. The novel is subtly preoccupied by the events of its own time, as Warren addressed them explicitly in other texts composed while this novel was in process. The novel engages the long-established tradition of the tragic mulatress through a main character who had grown up in Kentucky with the assumption that she was white but discovered, upon her father’s death, that she is black and will be sold at auction in New Orleans; the novel then follows her experiences through the Federal occupation of the city and into Reconstruction and The Gilded Age, each step of the way conjuring in vivid detail its historical setting and the complex persistence of racism even in those who wouldpresume to fight hard against it.