This volume is a collection of Charles Nordhoff's essays and journalism on the American Civil War and Reconstruction. Nordhoff was a vocal supporter of Lincoln's theory of the perpetual union of the Constitution and the impossibility of secession. His liberal sensibilities made him interested, like his fellow German-American Carl Schurz, in idealistic schemes of racial integration and efforts to reform Democrat-run city machines. His most important work from the period is his remarkable series of reports, full of eyewitness testimony, of the late stages of Reconstruction in the Deep South. His judgement on Reconstruction policies and their effects on racial relations were surprising to his readers and colleagues in the North and controversial at the time.

Here are collected:

1. The Freedmen of South Carolina: Some Account of their Appearance, Character, Condition, and Customs (1863)
2. America for Free Working Men! (1865)
3. The Misgovernment of New York: A Remedy (1871)
4. The Cotton States in the Spring and Summer of 1875 (1876)