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brought the certificate with them when they joined a new church in Mississippi after the war. It showed that they were serious—not merely cohabiting. It made Abram the legitimatefather of the fifteen children Lucinda bore. And it gave Lucinda recognition as someone who had already earned citizenship by supporting Abram, a soldier-citizen. That would entitle her to a claim to his pension, for she, too, had put her shoulder to the wheel of the nation. 8

    Image A.2. An enslaved man’s journey to escape, freedom, and death as a Union soldier martyred for the twin causes of the United States and freedom. Depicted by artist James Queen, who may have made the panel for Harper’s Weekly. Library of Congress.
    By 1864, once-enslaved people were marching through almost every southern state, not in tatters and chains, but bearing arms and wearingblue uniforms with the confidence of people who believed that the federal government would back their claims to rights. Their presence encouraged still-enslaved people to refuse to work for their owners, or to run to the woods. The growing number of U.S.C.T. enlistees also provided a crucial increment for a North that was running out of soldiers. Congress passed the Thirteenth Amendment in March1865, just before Lincoln’s second inauguration. The amendment ended slavery throughout the United States forever, freeingpeople even in areas not covered by the Emancipation Proclamation, such as the 425,000 African Americans who had still been enslaved in the border states. Soon afterward, Richmond fell, and Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia surrendered at Appomattox in Southside Virginiaon April 9, 1865. Confederate President Jefferson Davis had already fled Danville. Like the sold and stolen whom Lorenzo Ivy had seen flow by, and of whom he had spoken in his interview with Works Progress Administration worker Claude Anderson, Davis now carried his all in a little bag.
    After four years, the war was over. Although 700,000 Americans had died, mixed with the sorrow was joy. AsUnion troops spread throughout the remaining areas of the slave states in May and June of 1865, they found properties where people were still being held in slavery. Again and again, the scene of celebration was repeated, on days still remembered in African-American communities across the country as the holiday “Juneteenth,” for June 19. People broke into spontaneous song and dance. Some told enslaverswhat they really thought. Some set off on the road with everything they had, looking for lost ones, heading back to Tennessee or Virginia, or simply looking to get away. Some literally picked up their cabins and moved them out of sight of the big house. When landowners could get the attention of those whom they had once ruled, they sometimes offered to share the proceeds of the crop fifty-fifty.And more than one former enslaver, their world turned upside down, committed suicide on the day of jubilee.
    There was one final casualty, of course. In the surviving photo from March 4, 1865, the triumphant and solemn day of Lincoln’s second inauguration, you can see among the massive crowd of people covering the Capitol portico a mustached figure leaning against a pillar. For John Wilkes Boothwas present for Lincoln’s astonishing second inaugural address. This was, perhaps, the greatest speech ever given in the English language. It was itself a history of the half untold. It named slavery and the incessant pressure for its expansion as the reason why oceans of blood had drowned the battlefields of the Civil War. When he turned over the last page of his so-brief text, Lincoln had onlyforty days to live.
    After Richmond fell, the president went to visit. He walked through Shockoe Bottom in wonder, among throngs of people celebrating freedom on the very docks from which thousands of their kin had been shipped to the cotton country. Four million African Americans—most of whom had been enslaved when the first cannonballs