The era from 1865 to 1877 when the nation rebuilt the Union after the Civil War and, for a time, secured citizenship and voting rights for freedpeople.
Reconstruction is the era, commonly dated 1865 to 1877, in which the United States reunited after the Civil War and struggled over what freedom would mean for some four million formerly enslaved people. Under President Andrew Johnson’s lenient first program, former Confederates returned to power across the South and passed the Black Codes. Frederick Douglass led a delegation to Johnson to press for Black suffrage.
Congress then took control. The Civil Rights Act of 1866 defined national citizenship, and the Reconstruction Acts of 1867 divided the former Confederate states, except Tennessee, into five military districts and required new state constitutions based on manhood suffrage. Three amendments rewrote the Constitution: the Thirteenth (1865) abolished slavery, the Fourteenth (1868) made all persons born in the United States citizens entitled to equal protection of the laws, and the Fifteenth (1870) barred racial discrimination in voting.
Black Southerners seized the opening. By 1877 about 2,000 Black men had held public office in the South, including more than 600 state legislators. Some sixteen served in Congress, among them Hiram Revels of Mississippi, who in 1870 became the first African American senator; Blanche K. Bruce, the first to serve a full Senate term; and Robert Smalls of South Carolina. Reconstruction governments created the South’s first state-funded public school systems, and freedpeople built independent churches that became centers of community life.
Violence and Northern retreat brought the era to an end. The Ku Klux Klan and similar groups attacked Black voters and Republican officials; at Colfax, Louisiana, in 1873, scores of Black militiamen were killed. Congress passed Enforcement Acts in 1870 and 1871, but Supreme Court decisions including United States v. Cruikshank (1876) narrowed federal protection. In Mississippi, armed intimidation in the 1875 election returned white-supremacist Democrats to power. In the Compromise of 1877, which settled the disputed 1876 presidential election in favor of Rutherford B. Hayes, federal troops were withdrawn from the South. W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America (1935) later demolished the myth that the era failed through Black incapacity.
See also: Black Codes, Freedmen’s Bureau, Forty Acres and a Mule, Emancipation, Jim Crow, Poll Tax
Sources
- National Park Service, “Reconstruction.” Link
- U.S. House of Representatives, History, Art & Archives, “Reconstruction and Black Political Activism.” Link
- U.S. House of Representatives, History, Art & Archives, “The Demise of Reconstruction.” Link
- Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Mississippi History Now, “Reconstruction in Mississippi, 1865–1876.” Link
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