Reconstruction era
On the 14th of April 1865, John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln at Ford's Theatre. Lincoln died the following morning, and with him went any settled plan for what would come next. The Civil War was barely over. Eleven Confederate states needed to be brought back into a Union they had tried to leave. Three and a half million people had been freed from slavery overnight and had no land, no legal standing, and no guaranteed rights. The question hanging over the country was not just whether the nation could be reunited, but what kind of nation it would become.
The period that followed has a name: Reconstruction. Historians have debated exactly when it began and when it ended. Some say 1863, when Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Some say 1861, when the first Union soldiers arrived in Confederate territory and enslaved people began to escape to their lines. The Reconstruction Era National Historical Park formally proposed 1861 as its start date. The conventional end point is 1877, when federal troops were withdrawn from the South under the terms of a political compromise. Others push that boundary to 1890, when Congress failed to pass the Lodge Bill protecting Black voting rights. Historian Manisha Sinha extends it all the way to 1920, when the Nineteenth Amendment granted women the right to vote, which she calls the last of the Reconstruction amendments.
However its boundaries are drawn, Reconstruction remains one of the most contested and consequential episodes in American history. It produced three constitutional amendments. It created the first federal social welfare agency. It saw more than 1,500 African Americans hold public office in the South. And it collapsed under the weight of violence, political exhaustion, and a society that was not yet willing to make good on its promises.
The direct costs of the Confederate war effort, measured in human capital, government expenditures, and physical destruction, totaled $3.3 billion. By early 1865, the Confederate dollar had nearly zero value. The Southern banking system had collapsed. Eleven cities, including Atlanta, Charleston, Columbia, and Richmond, were destroyed or severely damaged by military action.
Forty percent of Southern livestock had been killed. The value of farm implements and machinery, which stood at $81 million according to the 1860 Census, had been reduced by 40 percent by 1870. More than two-thirds of the South's rails, bridges, rail yards, repair shops, and rolling stock lay in areas that Union armies had systematically destroyed. Even in untouched areas, lack of maintenance and deliberate relocation of equipment by Confederate forces ensured the transportation system would be ruined at war's end.
Over a quarter of White Southern men of military age had died during the war. Per capita income for White Southerners fell from $125 in 1857 to a low of $80 in 1879. The plantation economy, built entirely on enslaved labor, had been the region's financial foundation, and that foundation was gone. Having lost their enormous investment in slaves, plantation owners had almost no capital left to pay anyone to bring in crops.
Out of this collapse grew sharecropping. Landowners broke up their large estates and rented small plots to freedmen and their families. The system gave freedmen greater economic independence than the gang-labor patterns of slavery, but because they lacked capital and planters still owned the tools, draft animals, and land, freedmen were forced to produce cash crops for landowners and merchants. They entered what was called a crop-lien system. Within decades, the routine indebtedness of most freedmen, and the poverty of many planters, had become facts of Southern life.
Lincoln's plan for bringing the Confederate states back into the Union was called the ten percent plan. It required only one in ten of a state's 1860 voters to pledge an oath of loyalty to the Union, after which a functioning state government could be recognized and slavery abolished in the new state constitution. By 1864, Louisiana, Tennessee, and Arkansas had established functioning Unionist governments under this plan.
Congress rejected it. The Wade-Davis Bill proposed far stricter terms: a majority of voters would have to swear they had never supported the Confederacy, and anyone who had willingly aided the rebellion would lose the right to vote. Lincoln vetoed the bill, but the conflict it revealed did not go away. The question of how to treat the South, and who in the federal government had the power to decide, would dominate the next twelve years.
After Lincoln's assassination, Vice President Andrew Johnson became president. Radicals had initially considered him an ally. They were wrong. Johnson appointed his own governors, pardoned Confederate leaders freely, and tried to close the Reconstruction process by the end of 1865. He gave back most of the land confiscated from slaveholders. He repudiated General William Tecumseh Sherman's Special Field Order Number 15, the order that had become associated with the promise of forty acres and a mule as reparations for former slaves.
Representative Thaddeus Stevens was direct about what he believed was at stake. He insisted that Reconstruction must, in his words, "revolutionize Southern institutions, habits, and manners.... The foundations of their institutions... must be broken up and relaid, or all our blood and treasure have been spent in vain." Johnson's response was to veto the Civil Rights Act of 1866 on the 27th of March. Congress overrode him. The political break was complete.
Three amendments to the Constitution emerged from this era, and each one tried to do something the American founding had left unfinished. The Thirteenth Amendment, ratified on the 6th of December 1865, abolished slavery. The Fourteenth Amendment, proposed in 1866 and ratified in 1868, guaranteed citizenship to everyone born or naturalized in the United States and granted federal civil rights. The Fifteenth Amendment, proposed in 1869 and passed in 1870, stated that the right to vote could not be denied on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.
The Fourteenth Amendment went further than many expected. Its principal drafter, Representative John Bingham, designed it to put the key provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1866 into the Constitution itself, with federal courts empowered to protect the rights it created. It also penalized states that denied Black men the vote by reducing their congressional representation, and it guaranteed the federal war debt would be paid while specifying that the Confederate debt never would be.
In 1867 and 1868, the Reconstruction Acts imposed military government on ten of the former Confederate states, all except Tennessee, organizing them into five military districts under Army commanders. Congress temporarily suspended the voting rights of roughly 10,000 to 15,000 former Confederate officials and senior officers. Twenty thousand U.S. troops were deployed to enforce the acts. New constitutional conventions were held across the South, giving Black men the right to vote for the first time. In 1867, Black men voted for the first time in American history.
The Civil Rights Act of 1875, passed under President Ulysses S. Grant, went further still. But federal enforcement of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments would not be fully restored until the mid-1960s, nearly a century later, as a direct result of the civil rights movement.
Over the course of Reconstruction, more than 1,500 African Americans held public office in the South. Some had escaped to the North before the war and received educations there; they returned to help build a new political order. Others were natural leaders who emerged from within Southern communities. Black men voted, formed political parties, and organized churches and community organizations at a scale that had never before been possible under law.
The coalition that made this possible was composed of three groups: freedmen, white Southerners who supported the Union and were derisively called scalawags by their opponents, and Northerners who had moved to the South, many of them Union veterans, who were called carpetbaggers. New state constitutions were written. New governments were formed.
Before Reconstruction, slave marriages had not been legally recognized. Emancipation did not automatically change that. When freed, many people sought official marriages. The legal acknowledgment of marriage increased the state's recognition of freed people as legal actors and helped make the case for parental rights, which mattered because Black children were being legally removed from their families under laws like the Georgia 1866 Apprentice Act, under the pretext of providing guardianship until they reached twenty-one. Such children were generally used as sources of unpaid labor.
The Freedmen's Bureau, established by law on the 3rd of March 1865, was created to provide food, clothing, fuel, and help negotiating labor contracts. It was authorized to lease confiscated land in portions of up to 40 acres per buyer. It helped start schools, hospitals, and churches. By 1900, with emphasis within the Black community on education, the majority of Black Southerners had achieved literacy, a transformation from the over-70-percent illiteracy rate that had prevailed in the South during the Reconstruction period itself.
The Memphis riots of 1866, which took place from the 1st to the 3rd of May, killed 48 people, primarily freed African Americans, and injured 75. On the 30th of July 1866, at least 38 people were killed and 146 wounded in New Orleans at a racially integrated constitutional convention. Northern Republicans pointed to these events as proof that the Johnson administration's lenient approach was enabling the return of Confederate power.
Carl Schurz, sent to report on conditions along the Gulf Coast, documented dozens of extrajudicial killings and estimated hundreds or thousands more had occurred in areas without close military garrisoning. In Selma, Alabama, Major J. P. Houston reported that whites who killed twelve African Americans in his district never came to trial.
Organized groups made the violence systematic. The Ku Klux Klan, the White League, and the Red Shirts conducted what the source describes as paramilitary insurgency and terrorism to disrupt Reconstruction governments and terrorize Republicans. The Ku Klux Klan Act, signed into law on the 20th of April 1871 under President Grant, attempted to address this directly. In Tennessee alone, over 80,000 former Confederates had been disenfranchised to prevent their return to power, but the Redeemers, as those seeking to restore white supremacy were known, worked to reverse those conditions by force.
Black women faced particular vulnerability. The report of Frances Thompson and Lucy Smith, who described their violent sexual assault during the Memphis Riots of 1866, is one of the few documented accounts. Convicting white men of assaulting Black women was described as exceedingly difficult. The county court system, Schurz and others documented, was structured to generate fees and produce convictions of Black defendants, not to provide protection.
The presidential election of 1876 was contested. Democrat Samuel Tilden and Republican Rutherford B. Hayes both claimed victory in Florida, South Carolina, and Louisiana. An Electoral Commission was formed to resolve the dispute. The result was the Compromise of 1877, which awarded the presidency to Hayes on the understanding that federal troops would cease to play an active role in Southern politics. Hayes accordingly withdrew the last federal troops from the South.
Historians generally mark that withdrawal as the end of Reconstruction. What followed was a rapid dismantling of the gains of the preceding decade. From 1890 to 1908, Southern states passed new constitutions and laws that disenfranchised most Black voters and tens of thousands of poor whites through poll taxes, literacy tests, and subjectively administered registration rules. In some states, grandfather clauses were used to let illiterate whites vote while blocking Black men from doing so. The Supreme Court upheld many of these provisions. Most Black Southerners were prevented from voting until the 1960s.
The Lodge Bill, which would have secured federal oversight of Southern elections to protect Black voters, failed in 1890. Historian Fritzhugh Brundage marks that failure as the true end of Reconstruction. Heather Cox Richardson extends the period to 1920, when the election of Warren G. Harding ended a national disposition toward using federal power to promote equality.
Historians disagree about what Reconstruction accomplished. Criticism centers on the failure to prevent violence, corruption, starvation, and disease, and on the inadequacy of policy toward freed people. But the constitutional framework it produced, the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee of birthright citizenship, due process, and equal protection, and the Fifteenth Amendment's protection of voting rights regardless of race, eventually became the legal foundation on which the civil rights movement of the 1960s built its case.
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Common questions
When did the Reconstruction era begin and end?
The conventional dates for the Reconstruction era are 1865 to 1877, with 1865 marking the end of the Civil War and 1877 marking the withdrawal of the last federal troops from the South under the Compromise of 1877. Scholars have proposed alternative start dates ranging from 1861, when Union forces first arrived in Confederate territory, to 1863, when Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Some historians extend the end date to 1890, when the Lodge Bill failed, or to 1920.
What were the three Reconstruction amendments to the US Constitution?
The three Reconstruction amendments are the Thirteenth Amendment, ratified in 1865, which abolished slavery; the Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, which guaranteed citizenship and federal civil rights to all persons born or naturalized in the United States; and the Fifteenth Amendment, passed in 1870, which prohibited denying the right to vote based on race, color, or previous condition of servitude.
What was the Freedmen's Bureau and what did it do during Reconstruction?
The Freedmen's Bureau was a federal agency established by law on the 3rd of March 1865 to aid formerly enslaved people and white refugees after the Civil War. It provided food, clothing, fuel, and assistance negotiating labor contracts. The bureau was authorized to lease confiscated land in parcels of up to 40 acres per buyer and helped establish schools, churches, and hospitals across the South.
Why was Andrew Johnson impeached during Reconstruction?
Andrew Johnson was impeached by the House of Representatives on the 2nd and the 3rd of March 1868 on eleven articles of impeachment for violating the Tenure of Office Act, primarily by suspending Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. The Senate narrowly voted against conviction on the 26th of May 1868, so Johnson was not removed from office. The impeachment grew out of his repeated vetoes of Radical Republican legislation and his resistance to congressional Reconstruction policy.
How did the Compromise of 1877 end Reconstruction?
The Compromise of 1877 resolved the disputed presidential election between Republican Rutherford B. Hayes and Democrat Samuel Tilden by awarding the presidency to Hayes on the condition that federal troops would cease to play an active role in Southern politics. Hayes withdrew the last federal troops from the South, removing the military protection that had supported Reconstruction governments and Black voters throughout the region.
How many African Americans held public office during Reconstruction?
More than 1,500 African Americans held public office in the South over the course of Reconstruction. Some had escaped to the North before the war, received educations, and returned to participate in the new governments. Black men voted for the first time in 1867, following the passage of the Reconstruction Acts that granted male suffrage regardless of race in the former Confederate states.
All sources
165 references cited across the entry
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- 39Act of Congress, R.S. Sec. 2080 derived from act July 5, 1862, ch. 135, Sec. 1, 12 Stat. 528.United States House of Representatives
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- 139BookBlack Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880W. E. B. Du Bois — Harcourt, Brace and Company — 1935
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- 141JournalDemocracy, Anti-democracy, and the CanonRichard H. Pildes — 2000
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- 143The United States Needs a Third ReconstructionWilfred Codrington III — 2020-07-20
- 144Foner (1990) p. 256Foner — 1990
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- 153JournalReconstruction and the Making of a Free-Labor SouthNicole Etcheson — June 2009
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- 160Gone With the Wind (Film)Hugh Ruppersburg et al. — 2017
- 161NewsHenry Louis Gates Jr. and the Long Arc of ReconstructionRobert II Greene — 2019-08-13
- 162Journal"Epilogue" in The Reconstruction Era: Official National Park Service HandbookEric Foner — 2016
- 163MagazineWhy It Matters That U.S. Schools Are Failing to Teach the Reconstruction PeriodOlivia B. Waxman — January 12, 2022
- 164Erasing the Black Freedom Struggle: How State Standards Fail to Teach the Truth About ReconstructionAna Rosado et al. — 2022
- 165The South's schools are failing to teach accurate Reconstruction historyBenjamin Barber — 2022-02-17