The American Yawp — Chapter Fourteen: Reconstruction
Abridged for Intermediate-High Learners

Reconstruction (1865–1877) was the period when the United States tried to rebuild the South and define the rights of four million freedpeople after the Civil War. Americans debated these questions more openly than at any time since the nation's founding. The central questions were about citizenship and equality: who was a citizen, and what rights did freedom bring?

President Lincoln had a simple plan: when 10 percent of a state's voters took an oath of allegiance to the Union, the state could form a new government. Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation had freed enslaved people only in rebel areas. To end slavery everywhere, Congress passed the Thirteenth Amendment on January 31, 1865. The amendment made four million people forever free. On April 14, 1865, Lincoln was shot by John Wilkes Booth and died the next morning.

Vice President Andrew Johnson took office. His plan let Southern states return quickly if they ended secession, rejected Confederate debts, and agreed to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment. But Southern legislatures passed Black Codes that controlled Black life: freedpeople needed written proof of employment, and vagrancy laws let sheriffs arrest and fine them. Congress answered with the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Fourteenth Amendment, which granted citizenship to everyone born in the United States and promised "equal protection of the laws." Johnson opposed the Fourteenth Amendment and vetoed the Civil Rights Act, but Congress overrode his veto. In 1867 Congress divided the South into five military districts and ordered states to grant Black men suffrage before rejoining the Union. The House voted to impeach Johnson, but he escaped removal by a narrow vote in the Senate. In 1870, the Fifteenth Amendment protected Black men's right to vote.

Black Americans used their new rights. In 1868, General Ulysses S. Grant won the presidency with the slogan "Let Us Have Peace," helped by Black voters. Hiram Revels and Blanche K. Bruce became U.S. senators from Mississippi. P. B. S. Pinchback served as Louisiana's governor for 34 days. By 1877, more than 2,000 Black men had held offices from local posts to Congress. New state constitutions created public school systems across the South, though segregation persisted in the schools.

Freedom meant more than voting. Freedpeople searched for family members sold away during slavery and rushed to marry legally. General Sherman had set aside land for freed families in 1865, but the promise was broken, and most freedpeople entered sharecropping, working white-owned land for a share of the crop. The Freedmen's Bureau opened schools, and Black churches became centers of community life. It was not uncommon to find a one-room school with students from age three to eighty.

White Southerners fought back with terrorism. The Ku Klux Klan was organized in Pulaski, Tennessee, in 1866. Its nightriders killed Black voters and white Republicans to destroy Black political power. Congress passed the Enforcement Acts (1870–1871) to protect Black rights, but the violence continued. Nightriders also attacked Black families who tried to buy land.

In 1873 a financial panic started a long depression, and Northerners lost interest in Reconstruction. The 1876 presidential election was disputed. In the Compromise of 1877, Democrats let Republican Rutherford B. Hayes become president in exchange for the removal of all federal troops from the South. Reconstruction ended, and white Democrats retook Southern governments. With its most revolutionary aims thwarted, most of Reconstruction's promises went unmet. Legal slavery was dead, but Black Southerners remained second-class citizens.