"On April 9, 1865, Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant, ending the Civil War in Virginia. Less than a week later, President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, and Vice President Andrew Johnson became president. Johnson disliked the Southern planter aristocracy, but he had little sympathy for African Americans. With the end of the Civil War came the end of slavery in the American South, but racial hostilities toward the formerly enslaved African Americans continued throughout the Reconstruction era. Shortly before his death, Lincoln had recommended that some African Americans be permitted to vote. Their struggle to gain and to retain full citizenship and political rights was difficult and sometimes violent. In some of the first Southern legislative sessions after the war, former slaveholders passed Black Codes that placed restrictions on the rights of freedpeople and in some places, including Virginia, were regarded as little more than slavery by a different name. In 1866 Congress proposed the Fourteenth Amendment to define freedpeople as citizens and prohibit states from denying them rights of citizenship. Congress also passed the first of several civil rights acts to guarantee those rights. One required the former Confederate states to hold conventions to write new constitutions, and the army's commanding general in Virginia ordered that African Americans be given the right to vote for and to be elected delegates to the convention. In 1867, 105,832 freedmen registered to vote in Virginia, and 93,145 voted in the election that began on October 22, 1867. Artist Alfred Rudolph Waud depicted." The vote, however was upheld only by the military presence in the south.

By the picture we can see the different representations of freedmen. The front man is poor, the middle man is better off, and the last man is a soldier.