Reconstruction Era (1865-1877): Rebuilding the United States

The Reconstruction era was the period from 1865 to 1877 when the United States tried to rebuild the nation after the Civil War, bring the eleven former Confederate states back into the Union and decide what freedom would mean for about four million formerly enslaved people. It produced landmark constitutional amendments and the first Black members of Congress, but it ended with white Southern governments back in power and many of its promises unfulfilled. Historians now see it as one of the most important and contested chapters in American history.

Background: the problem of peace

When the war ended in the spring of 1865, much of the South lay in ruins, and its economy had depended on slave labour. The Emancipation Proclamation and the advance of Union armies had freed hundreds of thousands of people during the war, and the Thirteenth Amendment, ratified in December 1865, abolished slavery everywhere in the country.

Hard questions remained. On what terms should the rebel states return? Who should vote and govern there? Would freed people receive land, education and equal treatment before the law? President Lincoln had favoured a fairly lenient approach, but after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln in April 1865 the decisions fell to his successor, Andrew Johnson.

Presidential Reconstruction, 1865-1866

Johnson, a Tennessee Democrat who had stayed loyal to the Union, offered pardons to most former Confederates who took an oath of loyalty and allowed Southern states to form new governments quickly. He opposed voting rights for Black men and returned most confiscated plantation land to its former owners, undoing promises such as General Sherman’s Field Order No. 15.

The new Southern legislatures, dominated by former Confederates, passed “Black Codes” from late 1865. These laws restricted freed people’s right to own or rent land, punished unemployment as vagrancy and forced many into annual labour contracts. Southern voters also sent former Confederate leaders, including the Confederacy’s vice-president Alexander Stephens, to Congress.

Alongside these state governments, the federal Freedmen’s Bureau, created in March 1865 and headed by General Oliver O. Howard, tried to manage the transition from slavery to free labour. Its agents handed out millions of rations to Black and white Southerners alike, supervised labour contracts, settled disputes in special courts and helped churches and Northern aid societies open schools. With only a few hundred agents for the whole South at most times, it could protect freed people only unevenly.

Many Northerners saw this as an attempt to restore slavery in all but name. Violence deepened the alarm: riots in Memphis and New Orleans in 1866 left dozens of Black residents dead.

Congressional or Radical Reconstruction

Republicans in Congress refused to seat the Southern representatives. The Radical Republicans, led by Thaddeus Stevens in the House and Charles Sumner in the Senate, argued that the federal government must protect freed people’s rights. Congress extended the Freedmen’s Bureau and passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866 over Johnson’s veto, defining all persons born in the United States as citizens.

To place these rights beyond the reach of future majorities, Congress proposed the 14th Amendment in June 1866. It guaranteed birthright citizenship, due process and “equal protection of the laws”, and was ratified in July 1868. Republicans won a sweeping victory in the 1866 midterm elections.

The Reconstruction Acts of 1867 divided ten Southern states into five military districts under army commanders. To regain representation in Congress, each state had to write a new constitution that gave Black men the vote and ratify the 14th Amendment. Tennessee, which had already ratified, was exempt. The struggle between Johnson and Congress led to the impeachment of Andrew Johnson in 1868; he was acquitted by one vote. In the 1868 presidential election the Republican candidate, Ulysses S. Grant, defeated Horatio Seymour, helped by around half a million votes cast by newly enfranchised Black men in the South.

Black citizens in public life

The new state governments were coalitions of Black voters, white Northerners who had moved south (called “carpetbaggers” by opponents) and white Southern Republicans (called “scalawags”). For the first time, Black Americans voted in large numbers and held office across the South.

Historian Eric Foner documented more than 1,500 Black officeholders, from sheriffs and justices of the peace to legislators, and the total may have reached about 2,000. In 1870 Hiram Revels of Mississippi became the first Black US senator and Joseph Rainey of South Carolina the first Black member of the House. Blanche K. Bruce of Mississippi later served a full Senate term from 1875 to 1881. In all, sixteen Black men sat in Congress during Reconstruction.

The Reconstruction governments created the South’s first state-funded public school systems, built hospitals and railways, and rewrote tax laws. Freed people founded churches, reunited families separated by sale and eagerly sought education; colleges such as Fisk University (1866) and Howard University (1867) date from these years.

Freed families also tried to shape their own working lives. Most wanted land of their own, and when that proved impossible many refused to work in gangs under overseers as they had under slavery. A compromise gradually emerged in sharecropping, in which a family farmed its own plot in return for a share of the crop, usually half. It gave more independence than gang labour, but low cotton prices and high-interest credit from merchants often left families in debt.

The 15th Amendment, ratified in February 1870, barred states from denying the vote on the basis of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude”. It did not, however, forbid literacy tests or poll taxes, loopholes that Southern states later used to exclude Black voters.

White resistance and violence

Many white Southerners rejected the new governments as illegitimate. The Ku Klux Klan, founded in Pulaski, Tennessee, in 1865 or 1866, and similar groups used intimidation, beatings and murder against Black voters, teachers and Republican officials. Congress responded with the Enforcement Acts of 1870-1871, and President Ulysses S. Grant used federal troops and courts to break up the Klan in parts of South Carolina.

Violence did not stop. In the Colfax massacre in Louisiana on 13 April 1873, a white paramilitary force killed an estimated 60 to 150 Black men. Groups such as the White League in Louisiana and the Red Shirts in South Carolina openly used force to drive Republicans from power. In Mississippi in 1875 a campaign of intimidation returned the Democrats to control.

Retreat and the end of Reconstruction

Northern support faded during the 1870s. The Panic of 1873 began a long depression that turned voters’ attention to economic hardship, and corruption scandals in Grant’s administration damaged the Republicans. The Supreme Court narrowed the reach of the new amendments in the Slaughter-House Cases (1873) and United States v. Cruikshank (1876), which arose from the Colfax massacre.

By 1876 Democrats who called themselves “Redeemers” had regained control of most Southern states. The presidential election of 1876 between Republican Rutherford B. Hayes and Democrat Samuel Tilden ended in disputed returns from Florida, Louisiana and South Carolina. An electoral commission awarded all the disputed votes to Hayes, and in an informal bargain known as the Compromise of 1877, Hayes withdrew federal troops from the statehouses of South Carolina and Louisiana in April 1877. The last Republican state governments in the South then collapsed.

Consequences

Without federal protection, Southern states gradually stripped most Black citizens of the vote through poll taxes, literacy tests and violence, and built the system of racial segregation known as Jim Crow, largely complete by about 1900. Most freed families did not gain land and became sharecroppers or tenant farmers, often trapped by debt.

Yet the changes of Reconstruction were not erased entirely. The 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments stayed in the Constitution, and in the 20th century the civil rights movement and the Supreme Court relied on them to dismantle segregation. Historians have called this period America’s “second founding” and its “unfinished revolution”.

By the numbers

Myths and facts

Myth: Reconstruction was a corrupt “tragic era” imposed on a helpless South. This view, spread in the early 20th century by the historian William A. Dunning and his students and by the film The Birth of a Nation (1915), portrayed Black officeholders as incompetent. W. E. B. Du Bois challenged it in Black Reconstruction in America (1935), and most historians since the 1960s have rejected it. Corruption existed, but it was common in the North too, and the Reconstruction governments achieved real reforms.

Myth: Black politicians controlled Southern governments. Black men were a majority only in the lower house of South Carolina’s legislature, and no state elected a Black governor, though P. B. S. Pinchback briefly served as acting governor of Louisiana in 1872-1873.

Timeline

• 1865, 3 March: Congress creates the Freedmen’s Bureau.
• 1865, 6 December: The 13th Amendment, abolishing slavery, is ratified.
• 1866, 9 April: The Civil Rights Act of 1866 becomes law over Johnson’s veto.
• 1867, 2 March: The first Reconstruction Act places the South under military districts.
• 1868, 9 July: The 14th Amendment is ratified.
• 1870, 3 February: The 15th Amendment is ratified; Hiram Revels takes his Senate seat later that month.
• 1873, 13 April: The Colfax massacre in Louisiana.
• 1877, April: Federal troops are withdrawn from the South Carolina and Louisiana statehouses, ending Reconstruction.

Why it matters

Reconstruction redefined American citizenship. It turned millions of enslaved people into citizens and voters and wrote equality before the law into the Constitution. Its collapse showed how fragile those gains were without enforcement, and its amendments remained the legal foundation for the civil rights struggles of the next century.