Reconstruction

Reconstruction was the period from 1865 to 1877 in which the federal government attempted to rebuild the South and secure civil and political rights for the formerly enslaved. It produced the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments before ending in a political bargain that abandoned its aims.

The Civil War ended in April 1865. Four million enslaved people were free. The constitutional and political status of the defeated Confederate states was unsettled. President Lincoln, assassinated days after Appomattox, had favored lenient terms. President Andrew Johnson pursued an even more lenient policy, vetoing civil rights legislation and tolerating "Black Codes" that effectively reimposed forced labor in much of the South. Congressional Republicans pushed back. The Civil Rights Act of 1866 was passed over Johnson's veto. The Reconstruction Acts of 1867 divided the South into military districts and required new state constitutions guaranteeing Black male suffrage. Johnson was impeached and acquitted by one vote. Three Reconstruction Amendments were ratified between 1865 and 1870. The Thirteenth abolished slavery. The Fourteenth granted citizenship and guaranteed due process and equal protection. The Fifteenth protected the right to vote regardless of race. Federal troops occupied parts of the South. Black men voted in large numbers and won seats in Congress, state legislatures, and local offices. Public schools were established for the first time in many Southern states. Reconstruction was met with violent resistance. The Ku Klux Klan and similar groups terrorized Black voters and their white allies. Federal enforcement weakened through the 1870s as Northern political will faded. The contested election of 1876 was resolved by the Compromise of 1877, in which Republican Rutherford Hayes received the presidency in exchange for withdrawing federal troops from the South. The last Reconstruction governments fell. Within two decades, Southern states had largely disenfranchised Black voters through poll taxes, literacy tests, and intimidation, and had built the system of racial segregation that Plessy v. Ferguson would legitimize in 1896. The promises of Reconstruction would not be redeemed in any serious way until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, a century later.