Reconstruction era

Reconstruction is the name historians give to the troubled years after the American Civil War, conventionally dated 1865 to 1877, when the United States had to decide how to bring the defeated Southern states back into the Union and what freedom would mean for some four million formerly enslaved people. The period produced three constitutional amendments abolishing slavery and promising citizenship, equal protection and the vote regardless of race. It ended with federal withdrawal from the South and the return of white Democratic rule, and much of its promise went unfulfilled for nearly a century.

Many historians now trace Reconstruction to the war itself. Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation took effect on 1 January 1863, and in December that year he offered a lenient "ten percent plan": a seceded state could form a new government once a tenth of its 1860 voters swore loyalty to the Union. Radical Republicans in Congress wanted far stricter terms, and Lincoln vetoed their Wade–Davis Bill. In March 1865 Congress created the Freedmen's Bureau to supply food, clothing and help with labour contracts. The Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery, was ratified in December 1865.

Lincoln was assassinated in April 1865, days after the main Confederate army surrendered. His successor, Andrew Johnson of Tennessee, pardoned many Confederate leaders, returned much confiscated land to former slaveholders and allowed Southern legislatures to pass "Black Codes" that kept freed people in a subordinate position. Violence such as the Memphis riots and the New Orleans massacre of 1866 alarmed Northern voters. In March 1866 Johnson vetoed a civil rights bill, and Congress overrode him.

The 1866 elections gave Republicans two-thirds majorities in both houses. From March 1867 the Reconstruction Acts placed ten former Confederate states under military rule in five districts, with about 20,000 troops, until they adopted new constitutions accepting Black male suffrage and the Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868. Black men voted for the first time in 1867, and over the period more than 1,500 African Americans held public office in the South. New state governments founded the region's first state-funded public schools. Johnson was impeached in 1868 but escaped conviction in the Senate by a single vote.

Under Ulysses S. Grant, president from 1869, the Fifteenth Amendment of 1870 barred racial discrimination in voting, and Georgia, the last state to be readmitted, regained its seats in Congress in February 1871. Paramilitary groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, and later the White League and Red Shirts, terrorised Black voters and Republican officials. Congress responded with the Enforcement Acts, including the Ku Klux Klan Act of April 1871, and the new Justice Department brought hundreds of convictions. Sharecropping, meanwhile, replaced slave gang labour but often trapped families in debt.

Northern support faded amid scandals in Grant's administration and a Democratic revival, and many Republicans felt the war's aims had been met. One state after another fell to white "Redeemer" Democrats. The disputed 1876 presidential election was settled by the Compromise of 1877, which gave the White House to Rutherford B. Hayes, who then withdrew the remaining federal troops from Southern politics. From 1890 Southern states adopted constitutions and laws that stripped most Black citizens of the vote, and segregation followed.

Early twentieth-century historians of the Dunning School portrayed Reconstruction as a corrupt imposition on the white South. W. E. B. Du Bois challenged that view in 1935, and from the 1960s a new generation, including John Hope Franklin and Eric Foner, found much to praise in Radical Reconstruction. The promises of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments were not fully enforced until the civil rights laws of the mid-1960s.

Our 1878 map shows the reunited United States just after Reconstruction ended; the Confederate States of America page covers the breakaway South it had to reintegrate.