I Recommend: Willie Lee Rose, Rehearsal for Reconstruction

Still the best book about the achievements—and the failures—of this first test in defining freedom for the formerly enslaved. Strongest on the views and motives of the U.S. government, the Union Army, and the northerners who came south to uplift. Alas, the newly free did not write the letters and memoirs that the Boston Brahmins did. But there’s enough detail about the lives and the opinions of the newly free to see their hopes and understand their frustrations.