The book, "Lee: The Last Years", although IMO a bit of a hagiography, claims that Robert E Lee pushed hard for reconciliation after Appomattox, because he had looked at the Confederacy's defeat as God's judgment, and was a very devout man.

He told anyone who asked him to go home, accept that the South had lost, and rebuild their homes and communities. The book further claims that because of Lee's status among Confederate veterans, theIr defeat was accepted.

Note: I am not a professional historian, nor am I promoting the Lost Cause narrative. I am an amateur who is interested in the Civil War and RE Lee in particular, despite being from Vermont. If the mods think I should take this down, please delete it.

This seems as though it could be a survey question .."I still hate Yankees...strongly agree, somewhat agree, don't have an opinion, strongly disagree...". Not sure how it could be answered.

But there's one good example of them getting along afterwards. Virginian Alexander Boteler was very briefly Speaker of the House, making a futile "can't we just get along" speech just before the war broke out. He joined Lee's staff as an officer, and as a result had his farm torched, along with many others in the Shenandoah Valley, by Union General Hunter. Then there was a Confederate response in the burning of Chambersburg, PA. One of the Union soldiers from that area , who must have known people who'd lost property, was a man named George Beltzhoover, who became a lawyer. He and Boteler ended up living in Boteler's home, the same town of Shepherdstown,WV after the war, and became very good friends- even though they'd both ample reason to dislike each other in principle. But this may not be typical. Boteler was quite the Reconstructed Rebel, signing the loyalty oath soon after, and becoming a Federal bureaucrat, and Beltzhoover had moved himself to a Southern town- although one that was right on the border.

This is a topic of some debate to this day, but basically there was a rough trajectory in the opinion of both major sides. Right after the war ended things were very tense, with some retaliatory actions occurring in the years that followed (e.g. I study 19th century WV and we had unionists murdering confederates and vice versa in the first couple of years). There was something of an immediate move by many in the North, especially those who were lukewarm toward the war and especially toward Black civil rights to immediately forgive and to begin reintegrating Southerners into the national polity. This changed, however, when in the late 1860s White Southerners organized campaigns of racial terrorism to resubjugate freedmen. This led the Ulysses Grant administration to send armed forces into the South and use the military to enforce civil rights law. This battle led to some serious anti-Northern opinion in the South and vice versa. It's worth saying that there were always Southerners who were more open to the North, especially those that were anti-secession to begin with. And, of course, much of the South was African-American and they were generally very pro-North. But things are complicated. Harriet Beecher Stowe herself founded a school for freedmen in Florida and by the middle of the 1880s she found herself adopting anti-Black attitudes and sympathizing with Southerners. By the middle of the 1880s a reconciliation philosophy began to emerge where Northerners and Southerners alike warmed to each other and sacrificed black Civil Rights to build sectional unity. This came to full flower in the late 1890s/early 1900s when the idea that, "they all died honorably," became the dominant interregional interpretation of the Civil War. If you really want to know more, you can't go wrong reading "Race and Reunion" by David Blight, which is my primary source for this