Five months after the end of the Civil War, northern journalist Sidney Andrews toured the former Confederacy to report on the political, economic, and social conditions in the aftermath of the South's defeat. His more than forty articles in the Chicago Tribune and the Boston Advertiser were so popular with curious northerners that Andrews published them as a book in 1866. This new edition of that volume, abridged by Heather Cox Richardson, makes Andrews's vivid first-hand account of the South after the Civil War available once again to a wide audience.

Despite his claims to neutrality,...