Reconstruction in the United States (1865–1877)

Core Idea

Reconstruction was the period after the Civil War when the United States tried to rejoin the defeated Southern states to the Union and decide what freedom would mean for about four million formerly enslaved people. Congress passed the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, which ended slavery, made citizenship and equal protection national rights, and barred racial discrimination in voting. For a few years Black men voted and held office across the South. Violent resistance, Northern loss of interest and the withdrawal of federal troops in 1877 ended Reconstruction, and white Southern governments then built the Jim Crow system of segregation and disenfranchisement.

How It's Best Learned

Compare the plans of President Andrew Johnson and the Radical Republicans in Congress and ask who each plan left in power. Read the text of the Fourteenth Amendment's first section and discuss how later courts and movements used it. Use a timeline from 1865 to 1877 to show gains and then reversal, and link the period's unfinished promises to the twentieth-century civil rights movement.

Common Misconceptions

• Reconstruction failed because Black officeholders were corrupt or unprepared. (This view came from early-twentieth-century historians who defended white supremacy; later research showed that Reconstruction governments built public schools and other services, and that terror and political deals ended the period.)
• Formerly enslaved people received "forty acres and a mule." (A wartime order by General Sherman set aside land for freed families, but President Johnson reversed it, and most freedpeople received no land, so many became sharecroppers.)
• The Fifteenth Amendment gave all Americans the right to vote. (It barred denying the vote because of race, color or previous servitude; it did not cover women, and Southern states later used poll taxes, literacy tests and violence to keep Black citizens from voting.)

Explainer

When the Civil War ended in 1865, two questions faced the country. On what terms would the Confederate states return? And what rights would four million freed people have? The answers shaped American life for the next century.

President Andrew Johnson, who took office after Lincoln's assassination, offered easy terms to white Southerners. New Southern governments passed Black Codes that restricted freedpeople's movement and work and tried to rebuild a system close to slavery. Many Northerners were angry. Congress, led by Radical Republicans, took control. It created the Freedmen's Bureau in 1865 to provide food, schools and help with labor contracts. It passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866 over Johnson's veto and sent the Fourteenth Amendment to the states, ratified in 1868. The Reconstruction Acts of 1867 placed most Southern states under military districts until they wrote new constitutions that let Black men vote. The House impeached Johnson in 1868, and the Senate acquitted him by a single vote. The Fifteenth Amendment of 1870 barred states from denying the vote on account of race.

For a time, Southern politics changed sharply. Black men voted in large numbers and won office as sheriffs, legislators and members of Congress. Hiram Revels and Blanche K. Bruce of Mississippi served in the U.S. Senate. Reconstruction governments set up public school systems across the South, in most states for the first time. Freedpeople founded churches and schools and searched for family members sold away under slavery.

Economic freedom came more slowly. Most freedpeople received no land. Many became sharecroppers, farming land owned by others in return for a share of the crop, and often fell into debt.

White resistance was fierce. The Ku Klux Klan and similar groups used murder and terror against Black voters and their white allies. Federal laws against the Klan helped for a while, but after the Panic of 1873 Northern voters lost interest. The disputed election of 1876 was settled by the Compromise of 1877: Rutherford B. Hayes became president, and federal troops left the last Southern statehouses. White Democrats took full control. Over the next decades they passed segregation laws and stripped most Black citizens of the vote. In Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) the Supreme Court upheld segregation under the doctrine of "separate but equal."