The American Civil War (1861-1865) settled the issue of whether states could secede from the Union by making the United States one indivisible nation. The war also outlawed slavery. It left many other problems and issues in the post-war South unresolved, however. “Reconstruction” refers to the policies and events in the ten years after the Civil War relating to readmission of the former Confederate states into the Union and to rights for African Americans. Some northerners took a keen interest in conditions in the post-Civil-War South. One was renowned pastel artist James Wells Champney, who made more than 500 sketches for the publication “The Great South” shown here and later became a professor of art at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts.