Does everyone who has in their minds the image of Grant generously permitting Lee and his officers to keep their swords and horses after surrender also know that within months, the obstinate denial of the full citizenship of black people throughout the white South—by new statutes, by intimidation, violence, and rape—would lead Congress to expand the authority of the Freedmen's Bureau to try by military commissions those who denied the civil rights of freedmen…and then, less than two years after Appomattox, to divide virtually all the former Confederacy into five military districts in which army commanders were empowered to protect property and the public peace? Do they know that there were substantial areas on the margins of the Old Confederacy where white people carefully avoided letting black people know that slavery had ended and continued their lives as before? Misreadings of how slavery and its aftermath were experienced play into current ways of addressing race. Erasures of the past limit the options available in the future.