Reconstruction era removed civilian governments in the South, and placed the former Confederacy under the rule of the U.S. Army. The army conducted new elections in which the freed slaves could vote, while whites who had held leading positions under the Confederacy were temporarily denied the vote and were not permitted to run for office. In ten states, coalitions of freedmen, recent black and white arrivals from the North (carpetbaggers), and white Southerners who supported Reconstruction (scalawags) cooperated to form Republican biracial state governments. They introduced various reconstruction programs including: funding public schools, establishing charitable institutions, raising taxes, and funding public improvements
The Diary of a Public Man side, who blindly stumbled into the abyss. Modern jargon would call it a stretch to get "The Diary of a Public Man" back into the historical lexicon. But that is where it belongs. It parallels the work of Mary Chesnut, the observant South Carolinian who transformed skeletal notations made during wartime into something far more polished long after the fact. Her seeming diary was a memoir, historian C. Vann Woodward concluded, but "the facts bear her out" and her writing has "enduring value". Much the same must be said for "The Diary of a Public Man". The Diary of a