Reconstruction: A Brief History of the Reconstruction Era

The Reconstruction era typically refers to the period of United States history between 1865 and 1877. However, some historians cite Lincoln’s 1863 Emancipation Proclamation as the true start of Reconstruction. During this time, the United States federal government attempted to reform former Confederate states and ensure the civil rights and political rights of former slaves using a series of constitutional amendments known as the Reconstruction Acts. The federal government used the United States Army to enforce the precepts of Reconstruction, but by 1877, federal troops were pulled from Southern states, and a new era of white supremacy and segregation swept through the South.

The Reconstruction era saw the passing of three constitutional amendments, collectively referred to as the Reconstruction Acts. They were ostensibly aimed at providing equal rights to Black Americans.

• Abolition of slavery: On the heels of President Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution abolished slavery and involuntary servitude in the United States. It notably allowed for the enforcement of involuntary servitude as punishment for a crime.
• Equal protection under the law: The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution declared that all persons born in the United States were citizens. It granted all citizens—including former slaves—due process and equal protection under the law.
• Voting rights for Black men: The Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution promised suffrage to all adult men in the United States, regardless of race.

The Reconstruction era lasted from the end of the Civil War until the aftermath of the 1876 presidential election. Consider some of its key moments and leading figures.

• The Union Army wins the Civil War: The Union Army won the American Civil War in 1865, and the Confederate States of America dissolved. President Abraham Lincoln had previously declared the end of Confederate slavery in his 1863 Emancipation Proclamation, but it took military force to ensure that it was implemented.
• Military governors: Beginning in the Civil War and extending over a decade afterward, Southern states were effectively governed by Northern military commanders.
• Lincoln gives way to Johnson: President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in April 1865. His successor was Vice President Andrew Johnson. Lincoln had been a member of the Republican Party, which led the cause of abolition, but Johnson was a Democrat and skeptical of Republicans—particularly the self-styled Radical Republicans from Northern states who held considerable power in Congress. Johnson's sympathies lay with Democratic Southern states like Mississippi, Louisiana, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Virginia, and Johnson's own home state of Tennessee.
• Radical Republicans push Johnson: Johnson questioned the post–Civil War role of the military in Southern states and did not show the robust commitment to Reconstruction that Radical Republican congressmen did. The Radical Republicans won more seats in the 1866 midterm elections, and Johnson was forced to cooperate with their plans for Reconstruction.
• Ratification as a condition for rejoining the Union: Before he died, Lincoln embarked upon a policy of requiring breakaway Confederate states to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment as a condition of rejoining the Union. Despite protests from Johnson, Radical Republican politicians from the North instilled a similar policy regarding the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments. Southern state governments had to hold constitutional conventions and ratify those amendments as part of Reconstruction. The Fourteenth Amendment was ratified in 1868, and the Fifteenth Amendment followed in 1870. Southern state constitutions were redrafted—by Northern degree—to enshrine the rights of freed Black Americans per the text of the new constitutional amendments.
• Grant replaces Johnson: The House of Representatives impeached President Johnson in advance of the 1868 elections on account of his attempt to subvert Reconstruction, but the Senate acquitted him. Johnson could not secure the Democratic presidential nomination for another term. Meanwhile, the Republicans nominated Ulysses S. Grant, who favored the enhancement of Reconstruction, and Grant won the presidency in 1868. The Fifteenth Amendment was ratified under his watch.
• Difficulties in maintaining new programs: Congress established the Freedmen's Bureau in 1865, which Johnson tried to veto during his presidency and Grant tried to fund during his. The Bureau existed to help lift formerly enslaved Black people and poor Southern white people out of poverty in the aftermath of the Civil War. As part of this plan, the Bureau sought to grant land to newly freed Black Southerners and Southern white Unionists, but Johnson returned most of this land to the former slaveowners. Grant created the U.S. Department of Justice to help enforce the precepts of Reconstruction and prosecute members of the Ku Klux Klan, but the white supremacist terrorist group remained pervasive. Grant also passed the Civil Rights Act of 1875 to further enshrine the rights of Black and white people alike—a congressional act the Supreme Court would overturn in 1883.
• Carpetbaggers and scalawags: After the war, a sizable number of Northern abolitionists from states like Massachusetts, New York, and Pennsylvania moved south. These Northern transplants were seen as opportunistic, and Southern Democrats derided them as "carpetbaggers" due to the cheap luggage they often carried. White Southern Republicans who supported Reconstruction efforts were derided as “scalawags” by pro-Confederacy white supremacists.
• Reconstruction falters: Grant served two terms as president, but by his second term, the cost and slow progress of Reconstruction had unsettled many in the North. A new wing of Grant's Republican Party, calling themselves the Liberal Republicans, demanded an end to Reconstruction and the removal of U.S. Army troops from Southern states.
• The formal end of Reconstruction: In 1876, Republican Rutherford B. Hayes of Ohio squared off against Democrat Samuel Tilden of New York for the U.S. presidency. The electoral vote was inconclusive and the race was thrown to the U.S. House of Representatives to decide. Hayes prevailed in Congress by, among other things, pledging to end Reconstruction in an unwritten deal that came to be known as the Compromise of 1877. When he took office in 1877, he withdrew the last of the Union Army from the South, and the Reconstruction era officially reached its end.

The end of Reconstruction proved to be a major setback for the rights of Southern Black Americans.

• Reversal of rights: As the Union Army pulled out, white Southern leaders sought to remove Black Americans from positions of economic and political power. White politicians passed Jim Crow laws and Black Codes that severely limited the rights of Black people, despite the explicit instructions of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments. Prior to 1877, more than 600 Black men served in state legislatures. Following the end of Reconstruction, the number of Black officeholders in state and federal government plummeted.
• Poll taxes and literacy tests: To block Black people from voting, Southern politicians instituted poll taxes and literacy tests as a condition for voting. Due to what were known as "grandfather clauses," these hurdles applied disproportionately to prospective Black voters. In most cases, white voters could go to the polls without resistance, although some impoverished white people were also denied the vote.
• Terror and lynchings: Without a Northern army to instill order, white Southerners used mob violence to intimidate Black Americans and enforce new laws promoting segregation. Ku Klux Klan members rose to power and enacted new white supremacist laws that subjugated freed people to second-class citizenship.
• Inequity upheld by the Supreme Court: The United States Supreme Court upheld segregation practices in cases like Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which held that "separate but equal" facilities did not violate the intent of the Constitution.
• A century of segregation: Legal segregation continued in the South until the twentieth-century Civil Rights movement led to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965, both of which formally restored previously held rights.

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