Reconstruction

The Reconstruction era was the period in American history that lasted from 1865 to 1877 following the American Civil War (1861–65) and is a significant chapter in the history of American civil rights. Reconstruction ended the remnants of Confederate secession and abolished slavery, making the newly freed slaves citizens with civil rights ostensibly guaranteed by three new constitutional amendments, known collectively as Reconstruction Amendments. The 13th Amendment outlawed the practice of slavery unless for punishment for a crime. However, the Southern states did everything in their power to restrict the freedoms of freed slaves, usually through the passage of what were called Black Codes. After passing the Civil Rights Act (over Johnson’s veto), Republicans in Congress, called Radical Republicans, effectively took control of Reconstruction. The Reconstruction Act of 1867 required southern states to ratify the 14th Amendment—which granted “equal protection” of the Constitution to former enslaved people—and enact universal male suffrage before they could rejoin the Union. Again, these were opposed by former Confederates and loopholes were often found, such as poll taxes. The 15th Amendment, adopted in 1870, guaranteed that a citizen’s right to vote would not be denied “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” During this period of Radical Reconstruction (1867-1877), Black men won voting rights and many elections to southern state governments and even to the U.S. Congress. 

Three visions of Civil War memory appeared during Reconstruction: the reconciliationist vision, which was rooted in coping with the death and devastation the war had brought; the white supremacist vision, which included racial segregation and the preservation of white political and cultural domination in the South; and the emancipationist vision, which sought full freedom, citizenship, male suffrage, and constitutional equality for African Americans. 

When Republican President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated at the end of the Civil War, Vice President Andrew Johnson, a Democrat from Tennessee and former slave holder became president. Johnson favored rapid measures to bring the South back into the Union, allowing the Southern states to determine the rights of former slaves. Lincoln's last speeches show that he leaned toward supporting the suffrage of all freedmen, whereas Johnson and the Democratic Party were strongly opposed to this. Radical Republicans in Congress sought stronger, federal measures to upgrade the rights of African Americans, including the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, while curtailing the rights of former Confederates, such as through the provisions of the Wade–Davis Bill. Johnson, the most prominent Southerner to oppose the Confederacy, followed a lenient policy toward ex-Confederates.

Johnson's weak Reconstruction policies prevailed until the congressional elections of 1866, which followed outbreaks of violence against blacks in the former rebel states, including the Memphis riots of 1866 and the New Orleans massacre of 1866. The subsequent 1866 election gave Republicans a majority in Congress, enabling them to pass the 14th Amendment, federalizing equal rights for freedmen, and dissolving rebel state legislatures until new state constitutions were passed in the South. A Republican coalition came to power in nearly all of the Southern states and set out to transform the society by setting up a free labor economy, using the U.S. Army and the Freedmen's Bureau. The bureau protected the legal rights of freedmen, negotiated labor contracts, and set up schools and churches for them. Thousands of Northerners came to the South as missionaries, teachers, businessmen, and politicians. Hostile whites began referring to these politicians as "carpetbaggers."

In early 1866, Congress passed the Freedmen's Bureau and Civil Rights Bills and sent them to Johnson for his signature. The first bill extended the life of the bureau, originally established as a temporary organization charged with assisting refugees and freed slaves, while the second defined all persons born in the United States as national citizens with equality before the law. After Johnson vetoed the bills, Congress overrode his vetoes, making the Civil Rights Act the first major bill in the history of the United States to become law through an override of a presidential veto. The Radicals in the House of Representatives, frustrated by Johnson's opposition to congressional Reconstruction, filed impeachment charges. The action failed by one vote in the Senate. The new national Reconstruction laws, in particular laws requiring suffrage, or the right to vote for freedmen, incensed white supremacists in the South, giving rise to the Ku Klux Klan. During 1867–69, the Klan murdered Republicans and outspoken/vulnerable freedmen in the South.

Elected in 1868, Republican President Ulysses S. Grant supported congressional Reconstruction and enforced the protection of African Americans in the South through the use of the Enforcement Acts passed by Congress. Grant used the Enforcement Acts to combat the Ku Klux Klan, which was essentially wiped out, although a new incarnation of the Klan would return to prominence in the 1920s. Nevertheless, Grant was unable to resolve the escalating tensions inside the Republican Party between Northern Republicans and Southern Republicans (this latter group would be labelled "scalawags" by those opposing Reconstruction). Meanwhile, "Redeemers," self-styled conservatives in close cooperation with a faction of the Democratic Party, strongly opposed Reconstruction. They alleged widespread corruption by the "carpetbaggers," excessive state spending, and ruinous taxes. Reconstruction also coincided with Westward expansion by former soldiers and freed slaves. Congress passed the Homestead Act and Morrill Act in 1862 and the Dawes Act in 1887 to aid (mostly white) settlers populate the West. 

Despite the best efforts of Northerners and Radical Republicans, political power eventually returned to the former Confederates after the Presidential election of 1876, where Southerners made a deal with Radical Republicans to elect Rutherford B. Hayes as President in exchange for the return of control of Southern states to members of the Confederacy. Once the Southern states controlled their own governments again and were able to elect their own federal representatives they did everything they could to disenfranchise freedmen and strip them of their newfound rights. As a part of this system Southerners invented modern racism, mass incarceration and hysteria to return former slaves to their former station of oppression. Southern states passed Black Codes, restricting the lives of Black Americans through laws that aimed to incarcerate them, force them to work for low wages (sharecropping), and restrict where and how they could live. These laws would evolve and change over time into Jim Crow laws, and they made criminals out of freed slaves in anyway they could, such as segregation and redlining to limit access to housing and healthcare.

Historian Eric Foner argues: "What remains certain is that Reconstruction failed, and that for Blacks its failure was a disaster whose magnitude cannot be obscured by the genuine accomplishments that did endure."

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