Volume 4, The Struggle for Healing, presents the complex history of the period when Republicans instituted "Reconstruction." Through the life of Charles Sumner, Republican Senator from Massachusetts, we witness his long-standing idealism become Party dogma, as the Republican Party discards policies of Exclusionism and Deportationism and embraces policies of Abolitionism and African American voting rights. Republican "Reconstruction" dealt with remaking Ex-Confederate State Governments around Republican political machines, which were empowered by organizing the votes of newly independent African American men while restricting voting by other ex-Confederate men. Its aim was to sustain Republican Party control over the Federal Government after the end of military rule over the eleven ex-Confederate States, whose European American population would fiercely hate Republicans for several generations yet unborn. Be assured that Republican "Reconstruction" had nothing to do with rebuilding what the Federals had destroyed in their conquest of the Confederacy. For a while, the big winners in this, the greatest of American dramas, are the 4,000,000 African Americans. But the Republican campaign to use African American men for near-term political purposes -- using them to help subjugate their European American neighbors -- would greatly damage what could have been a rather friendly relationship between the races in the ex-Confederate States.
Meanwhile Republican leaders purposely abuse Jefferson Davis, who remains imprisoned at Fortress Monroe. They hope to break his will to defend against a contrived treason charge, but he endures it all. With help from his wife Varina, and surprisingly even from Horace Greeley, whose New York Tribune had once been the most effective "Bleeding Kansas" propaganda organ, Davis eventually gets released on bond. Realizing they would lose their case against Davis if they were to bring him to trial, Republicans finally abandon prosecution plans. But Davis's Federal citizenship would never be restored, because he symbolized "State Sovereignty:" the Constitutional principle upon which the United States Government had been established, and the principle that the Republicans had destroyed. In future years Confederate military leaders, such as Robert E. Lee, could be admired, but never Confederate political leaders, especially never Jefferson Davis.
Meanwhile Republican House Ways and Means Chairman Thad Stevens of Pennsylvania, so powerful that he is practically a dictator over the Federal House, schemes to confiscate eighty-five percent of the land in the ex-Confederate States -- a program that comes close to being implemented. In a mighty climax, the failure of the Federal land confiscation campaign becomes evident when the Senate falls one vote short of convicting President Andrew Johnson on the House's impeachment charge. That one vote is from a conscientious Senator from -- surprise -- Kansas. By his vote the ex-Confederate States escape massive land confiscation and the more extreme persecution that would have followed the replacement of Andrew Johnson with Ben Wade of Ohio. This outcome was, in reality, best for newly independent African Americans, for Republicans had planned to keep African American men in the southern States by giving them only a small percentage of the confiscated land, the less valuable land for small, marginal subsistence farms, leaving the rest to sell at discounted prices to bidders from the northern States -- the only people who had any money. Soon after Johnson's acquittal, Thad Stevens dies of illness.
Much of the remaining history is presented through the lives of Charles Sumner and Jefferson Davis. Midway through these chapters Charles Sumner dies.
But Jefferson Davis lives on and writes his two-volume history, The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government.
Volume 4, The Struggle for Healing, concludes with the election of Democrat Grover Cleveland, twenty-four years after the sectional Republican Party had taken control of the Federal Government. His election reestablishes nationally based politics and makes possible the dismantling of the graft-ridden system of limiting government jobs to Republican Party workers. The final chapter completes the lives of Jefferson and Varina Davis. Jeff is given the most moving funeral ever conducted in the States that once were the Confederate States of America. Varina lives on for several more years in New York City, working as an editor and writing, Jefferson Davis, A Memoir by his wife Varina Davis.