essay on civil war and reconstruction

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Reconstruction

By: History.com Editors

Updated: January 24, 2024 | Original: October 29, 2009

Reconstruction (1865-1877), the turbulent era following the Civil War, was the effort to reintegrate Southern states from the Confederacy and 4 million newly-freed people into the United States. Under the administration of President Andrew Johnson in 1865 and 1866, new southern state legislatures passed restrictive “ Black Codes ” to control the labor and behavior of former enslaved people and other African Americans. 

Outrage in the North over these codes eroded support for the approach known as Presidential Reconstruction and led to the triumph of the more radical wing of the Republican Party. During Radical Reconstruction, which began with the passage of the Reconstruction Act of 1867, newly enfranchised Black people gained a voice in government for the first time in American history, winning election to southern state legislatures and even to the U.S. Congress. In less than a decade, however, reactionary forces—including the Ku Klux Klan —would reverse the changes wrought by Radical Reconstruction in a violent backlash that restored white supremacy in the South.

Emancipation and Reconstruction

At the outset of the Civil War , to the dismay of the more radical abolitionists in the North, President Abraham Lincoln did not make abolition of slavery a goal of the Union war effort. To do so, he feared, would drive the border slave states still loyal to the Union into the Confederacy and anger more conservative northerners. By the summer of 1862, however, enslaved people, themselves had pushed the issue, heading by the thousands to the Union lines as Lincoln’s troops marched through the South. 

Their actions debunked one of the strongest myths underlying Southern devotion to the “peculiar institution”—that many enslaved people were truly content in bondage—and convinced Lincoln that emancipation had become a political and military necessity. In response to Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation , which freed more than 3 million enslaved people in the Confederate states by January 1, 1863, Black people enlisted in the Union Army in large numbers, reaching some 180,000 by war’s end.

Did you know? During Reconstruction, the Republican Party in the South represented a coalition of Black people (who made up the overwhelming majority of Republican voters in the region) along with "carpetbaggers" and "scalawags," as white Republicans from the North and South, respectively, were known.

Emancipation changed the stakes of the Civil War, ensuring that a Union victory would mean large-scale social revolution in the South. It was still very unclear, however, what form this revolution would take. Over the next several years, Lincoln considered ideas about how to welcome the devastated South back into the Union, but as the war drew to a close in early 1865, he still had no clear plan. 

In a speech delivered on April 11, while referring to plans for Reconstruction in Louisiana, Lincoln proposed that some Black people–including free Black people and those who had enlisted in the military –deserved the right to vote. He was assassinated three days later, however, and it would fall to his successor to put plans for Reconstruction in place.

Andrew Johnson and Presidential Reconstruction

At the end of May 1865, President Andrew Johnson announced his plans for Reconstruction, which reflected both his staunch Unionism and his firm belief in states’ rights. In Johnson’s view, the southern states had never given up their right to govern themselves, and the federal government had no right to determine voting requirements or other questions at the state level. 

Under Johnson’s Presidential Reconstruction, all land that had been confiscated by the Union Army and distributed to the formerly enslaved people by the army or the Freedmen’s Bureau (established by Congress in 1865) reverted to its prewar owners. Apart from being required to uphold the abolition of slavery (in compliance with the 13th Amendment to the Constitution ), swear loyalty to the Union and pay off war debt, southern state governments were given free rein to rebuild themselves.

As a result of Johnson’s leniency, many southern states in 1865 and 1866 successfully enacted a series of laws known as the “ black codes ,” which were designed to restrict freed Black peoples’ activity and ensure their availability as a labor force. These repressive codes enraged many in the North, including numerous members of Congress, which refused to seat congressmen and senators elected from the southern states. 

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 formerly enslaved people, while the second defined all persons born in the United States as national citizens who were to enjoy equality before the law. After Johnson vetoed the bills—causing a permanent rupture in his relationship with Congress that would culminate in his impeachment in 1868—the Civil Rights Act became the first major bill to become law over presidential veto.

Radical Reconstruction

After northern voters rejected Johnson’s policies in the congressional elections in late 1866, Radical Republicans in Congress took firm hold of Reconstruction in the South. The following March, again over Johnson’s veto, Congress passed the Reconstruction Act of 1867, which temporarily divided the South into five military districts and outlined how governments based on universal (male) suffrage were to be organized. The law also required southern states to ratify the 14th Amendment , which broadened the definition of citizenship, granting “equal protection” of the Constitution to formerly enslaved people, before they could rejoin the Union. In February 1869, Congress approved the 15th Amendment (adopted in 1870), which guaranteed that a citizen’s right to vote would not be denied “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”

By 1870, all of the former Confederate states had been admitted to the Union, and the state constitutions during the years of Radical Reconstruction were the most progressive in the region’s history. The participation of African Americans in southern public life after 1867 would be by far the most radical development of Reconstruction, which was essentially a large-scale experiment in interracial democracy unlike that of any other society following the abolition of slavery. 

Southern Black people won election to southern state governments and even to the U.S. Congress during this period. Among the other achievements of Reconstruction were the South’s first state-funded public school systems, more equitable taxation legislation, laws against racial discrimination in public transport and accommodations and ambitious economic development programs (including aid to railroads and other enterprises).

Reconstruction Comes to an End

After 1867, an increasing number of southern whites turned to violence in response to the revolutionary changes of Radical Reconstruction. The Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist organizations targeted local Republican leaders, white and Black, and other African Americans who challenged white authority. Though federal legislation passed during the administration of President Ulysses S. Grant in 1871 took aim at the Klan and others who attempted to interfere with Black suffrage and other political rights, white supremacy gradually reasserted its hold on the South after the early 1870s as support for Reconstruction waned. 

Racism was still a potent force in both South and North, and Republicans became more conservative and less egalitarian as the decade continued. In 1874—after an economic depression plunged much of the South into poverty—the Democratic Party won control of the House of Representatives for the first time since the Civil War.

When Democrats waged a campaign of violence to take control of Mississippi in 1875, Grant refused to send federal troops, marking the end of federal support for Reconstruction-era state governments in the South. By 1876, only Florida, Louisiana and South Carolina were still in Republican hands. In the contested presidential election that year, Republican candidate Rutherford B. Hayes reached a compromise with Democrats in Congress: In exchange for certification of his election, he acknowledged Democratic control of the entire South. 

The Compromise of 1876 marked the end of Reconstruction as a distinct period, but the struggle to deal with the revolution ushered in by slavery’s eradication would continue in the South and elsewhere long after that date. 

A century later, the legacy of Reconstruction would be revived during the civil rights movement of the 1960s, as African Americans fought for the political, economic and social equality that had long been denied them.

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Slavery, Abolition, Emancipation and Freedom

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Reconstruction, 1865-1877

Donald Brown, Harvard University, G6, English PhD Candidate

No period in American history has had more wide-reaching implications than Reconstruction. However, white supremacist mythologies about those contentious years from 1865-1877 reigned supreme both inside and outside the academy until the 1960s. Columbia University’s now-infamous Dunning School (1900-1930) epitomizes the dominant narrative regarding Reconstruction for over half of the twentieth century. From their point of view, Reconstruction was a tragic period of American history in which vengeful White Northern radicals took over the South. In order to punish the White Southerners they had just defeated in the Civil War, these Radical Republicans gave ignorant freedmen the right to vote. This resulted in at least 2,000 elected Black officeholders, including two United States senators and 21 representatives. In order to discredit the sweeping changes taking place across the American South, conservative historians argued this period was full of corruption and disorder and proved that Black Americans were not fit to leadership or citizenship.

Thanks to the work of a number of Black and leftist historians—most notably John Roy Lynch, W.E.B. Du Bois, Willie Lee Rose, and Eric Foner—that negative depiction of Reconstruction is being overturned. As Du Bois famously wrote in Black Reconstruction in America (1935), this was a time in which “the slave went free; stood for a brief moment in the sun; and then moved back again toward slavery.” During that short time in the sun, underfunded biracial state governments taxed big planters to pay for education, healthcare, and roads that benefited everyone. There is still much more to be unpacked from this rich period of American history, and Houghton Library contains a wealth of material to further buttress new narratives of that era.

Reconstructing Reconstruction

While some academics, like those of the Dunning School, interpreted Reconstruction as doomed to failure, in the years immediately following the Civil War there were many Americans, Black and White, who saw the radical reforms as being sabotaged from the outset. Writer and civil rights activist Albion W. Tourgée published his best selling novel Bricks Without Straw in 1880. Unlike most White authors at the time, Tourgée centered Black characters in his novel, showing how the recently emancipated were faced with violence and political oppression in spite of their attempts to be equal citizens.

In this period, two of the most iconic amendments were implemented. The Fourteenth Amendment ratified several crucial civil rights clauses. The natural born citizenship clause overturned the 1857 supreme court case, Dred Scott v. Sandford , which stated that descendants of African slaves could not be citizens of the United States. The equal protection clause ensured formerly enslaved persons crucial legal rights and validated the equality provisions contained in the Civil Rights Act of 1866. Even though many of these clauses were cleverly disregarded by numerous states once Reconstruction ended, particularly in the Deep South, the equal protection clause was the basis of the NAACP’s victory in the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954). The Fifteenth Amendment guaranteed another important civil right: the right to vote. No longer could any state discriminate on the basis of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. At Houghton, we have proof of the exhilarating response Black Americans had to the momentous progress they worked so hard to bring about: Nashvillians organized a Fifteenth Amendment Celebration on May 4, 1870. And once again, during the classical period of the Civil Rights Movement, leaders appealed to this amendment to make their case for what became the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The Reign of Kings Alpha and Abadon

Lorenzo D. Blackson's fantastical allegory novel, The Rise and Progress of the Kingdoms of Light & Darkness ; Reign of Kings Alpha and Abadon (1867), is one of the most ambitious creative efforts of Black authors during Reconstruction. A Protestant religious allegory in the lineage of John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress , Blackson's novel follows his vision of a holy war between good and evil, showing slavery and racial oppression on the side of evil King Abadon and Protestant abolitionists and freemen on the side of good King Alpha. The combination of fantasy holy war, religious pedagogy, and Reconstruction era optimism provide a unique insight to one contemporary Black perspective on the time.

It is important to emphasize that these radical policy initiatives were set by Black Americans themselves. It was, in fact, from formerly enslaved persons, not those who formerly enslaved them, that the most robust notions of freedom were imagined and enacted. With the help of the nation’s first civil rights president, Ulysses S. Grant (1869-1877), and Radical Republicans, such as Benjamin Franklin Wade and Thaddeus Stevens, substantial strides in racial advancement were made in those short twelve years. Houghton Library is home to a wide array of examples of said advancement, such as a letter written in 1855 by Frederick Douglass to Charles Sumner, the nation’s leading abolitionist. In it, he argues that Black Americans, not White abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison, founded the antislavery movement. That being said, Douglass was appreciative of allies, such as President Grant, of whom he said: “in him the Negro found a protector, the Indian a friend, a vanquished foe a brother, an imperiled nation a savior.” Houghton Library also houses an extraordinary letter dated December 1, 1876 from Sojourner Truth , famous abolitionist and women’s rights activist, who could neither read nor write. She had someone help steady her hand so she could provide a signed letter to a fan, and promised to also send her supporter an autobiography, Narrative of Sojourner Truth: A Bondswoman of Olden Time, Emancipated by the New York Legislature in the Early Part of the Present Century: with a History of Her Labors and Correspondence.

In this hopeful time, Black Americans, primarily located in the South, were determined to use their demographic power to demand their right to a portion of the wealth and property their labor had created. In states like South Carolina and Mississippi, which were majority Black at the time, and Louisiana , Alabama, and Georgia , with Black Americans consisting of nearly half of the population, the United States elected its first Black U.S. congressmen. Now that Black Southern men had the power to vote, they eagerly elected Black men to represent their best interests. Jefferson Franklin Long (U.S. congressman from Georgia), Joseph Hayne Rainey (U.S. congressman from South Carolina), and Hiram Rhodes Revels (Mississippi U.S. Senator) all took office in the 41st Congress (1869-1871). These elected officials were memorialized in a lithograph by popular firm Currier and Ives. Other federal agencies, such as the Freedmen’s Bureau , also assisted Black Americans build businesses, churches, and schools; own land and cultivate crops; and more generally establish cultural and economic autonomy. As Frederick Douglass wrote in 1870, “at last, at last the black man has a future.”

Black Americans quickly took full advantage of their newfound freedom in a myriad of ways. Alfred Islay Walden’s story is a particularly remarkable example of this. Born a slave in Randolph County, North Carolina, he only gained freedom after Emancipation. He traveled by foot to Washington, D.C. and made a living selling poems and giving lectures across the Northeast. He also attended school at Howard University on scholarship, graduating in 1876, and used that formal education to establish a mission school and become one of the first Black graduates of New Brunswick Theological Seminary. Walden’s Miscellaneous Poems, Which The Author Desires to Dedicate to The Cause of Education and Humanity (1872) celebrates the “Impeachment of President Johnson,” one of the most racist presidents in American history; “The Election of Mayor Bowen,” a Radical Republican mayor of Washington, D.C. (Sayles Jenks Bowen); and Walden’s own religious convictions, such as in “Jesus my Friend;” among other topics.

Black newspapers quickly emerged during Reconstruction as well, such as the Colored Representative , a Black newspaper based in Lexington, KY in the 1870s. As editor George B. Thomas wrote in an “Extra,” dated May 25, 1871 : “We want all the arts and fashions of the North, East and Western states, for the benefit of the colored people. They cannot know what is going on, unless they read our paper.... Now, we want everything that is a benefit to our colored people. Speeches, debates, and sermons will be published.”

Reconstruction proves that Black people, when not impeded by structural barriers, are enthusiastic civic participants. Houghton houses rich archival material on Black Americans advocating for civil rights in Vicksburg, Mississippi , Little Rock, Arkansas , and Atlanta, Georgia , among other states, in the forms of state Colored Conventions and powerful political speeches . For anyone interested in the long history of the Civil Rights Movement, these holdings are a treasure trove waiting to be mined. Though the moment in the sun was brief, the heat exuded during Reconstruction left a deep impact on progressive Americans and will continue to provide an exemplary political model for generations to come.

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Period 5: 1848-1877 (AP US History)

Period 5: 1848-1877.

As the nation expanded and its population grew, regional tensions, especially over slavery, led to a civil war—the course and aftermath of which transformed American society. Topics may include

Manifest Destiny

The mexican–american war, attempts to resolve conflicts over the spread of slavery, the election of 1860 and southern secession, the civil war, reconstruction.

Image Source : A detail from A Ride for Liberty—The Fugitive Slaves , a painting by Eastman Johnson, ca. 1862. (Brooklyn Museum)

10-17% Exam Weighting

Resources by Period:

• Period 1: 1491–1607
• Period 2: 1607–1754
• Period 3: 1754–1800
• Period 4: 1800–1848
• Period 5: 1844–1877
• Period 6: 1865–1898
• Period 7: 1890–1945
• Period 8: 1945–1980
• Period 9: 1980–Present

Key Concepts

5.1 : The United States became more connected with the world, pursued an expansionist foreign policy in the Western Hemisphere, and emerged as the destination for many migrants from other countries.

5.2 : Intensified by expansion and deepening regional divisions, debates over slavery and other economic, cultural, and political issues led the nation into civil war.

5.3 : The Union victory in the Civil War and the contested reconstruction of the South settled the issues of slavery and secession, but left unresolved many questions about the power of the federal government and citizenship rights.

On the emigrant trail

Letter explaining the challenges faced by emigrants heading west before railroads

• Primary Source

Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune, advocates westward expansion

Women of the West

By virginia scharff.

Read about the critical roles women have played from the earliest Indian societies to the era of the homesteaders.

How did Manifest Destiny shape the American West?

By maria montoya.

Watch a discussion of the origins of the idea of Manifest Destiny.

The Great West Illustrated

Photographs depicting the Union Pacific Railroad and the rugged beauty of western landscapes

Plea to Defend the Alamo

Alamo defender's desperate appeal for reinforcements

A Christian Soldier in the US-Mexican War

By amy s. greenberg.

Read about a soldier's observations about the invasion and occupation of Central Mexico.

Remembering the Alamo

By char miller.

Read about the history of San Antonio and the Alamo.

Inside the Vault: Texas Declaration of Independence

By h. w. brands.

Watch a discussion of the Texas Declaration of Independence.

Mexicans in the Making of America

By neil foley.

Learn about the impact of territorial loss on Mexican-Americans after 1848

Runaway slave ad

Rewards for the return of four men escaping slavery in Missouri

“Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and the Matter of Influence

By hollis robbins.

Examine the enduring influence and importance of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin.

The “House Divided” Speech

Ca. 1857–1858.

Speech fragment expressing Abraham Lincoln's view of slavery as a threat to the existence of the US

Buying Frederick Douglass’s freedom

Letter discussing the negotiations pertaining the buying of Frederick Douglass’s freedom

Harriet Beecher Stowe shares “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”

Letter to Prince Albert recognizing English strides in their treatment of an “oppressed race"

African American Abolitionists

By evelyn brooks higginbotham.

Watch a discussion of Black abolitionists.

Dred and Harriet Scott

By matthew pinsker.

Watch a discussion of Dred Scott as more than a court case, but as a family story of slavery and freedom.

Backlash against the Fugitive Slave Act

By lois e. horton.

Watch a discussion of how the Fugitive Slave Act changed northern views of slavery.

An African American protests the Fugitive Slave Law

A Black businessman refuses to do work for a US marshal 

Slave auction catalog from Louisiana

Catalogue for an estate sale including enslaved individuals

Abolitionism: A Grassroots Movement

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The Underground Railroad and the Coming of War

Understand the historical context of the Underground Railroad.

Understanding Lincoln: House Divided Speech (1858)

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“Bleeding Kansas” and the Pottawatomie Massacre

Letter from a woman who lost family to John Brown, written to him in prison

John Brown’s final speech

John Brown’s final speech defending his actions at Harper's Ferry

The Union Is Dissolved!

Broadside published after South Carolina's secession

The South Carolina Secession Ordinance

By charles dew.

Watch a discussion of how the Secession Ordinance led directly to the Civil War. 

Understanding Lincoln: First Inaugural Address (1861)

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Abraham Lincoln and Jacksonian Democracy

By sean wilentz.

Examine the influence of Jacksonian democracy on Abraham Lincoln.

Understanding Lincoln: Cooper Union Speech (1860)

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President Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address

President Lincoln’s appeal to "the better angels of our nature" to hold the nation together

The American Civil War

By gary gallagher.

Learn about the causes and key turning points in the Civil War.

The Men of Company E

Watch a discussion of points of view of Black soldiers in a postwar photograph.

Allies for Emancipation?

By manisha sinha.

Learn about Lincoln's evolving position on abolition, emancipation, and African Americans.

What caused the Civil War

By edward l. ayers.

Watch a discussion of slavery as the cause of the Civil War.

Best friends divided by the Civil War

Correspondence reflecting views of two friends on opposite sides of the Civil War

A proposed Thirteenth Amendment to prevent secession

Proposed prewar thirteenth amendment protecting slavery

A proclamation on the suspension of habeas corpus

Lincoln ordering the suspension of habeas corpus in Maryland

Lincoln on the execution of a slave trader

Lincoln denying clemency to a convicted slave trader

African American soldiers at the Battle of Fort Wagner

Currier & Ives print of the famed Massachusetts 54th

The Gettysburg Address

Address commemorating those who had sacrificed their lives for the Union

A Tour of the Battle of Gettysburg

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The Emancipation Proclamation

By allen guelzo.

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Understanding Lincoln: Emancipation

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Enslaved Children of New Orleans

Photograph of emancipated children used to raise money for the education of freed enslaved people

African Americans and Emancipation

Read about the movement to extend freedom to African Americans.

Why the Union Won

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Fascination with the Civil War

Watch a discussion of why the Civil War remains of great interest to Americans.

Civil War and Reconstruction, 1861-1877

By eric foner.

Civil War and Reconstruction (1861-1877) Timeline and essay addressing the impact of the Civil War and Reconstruction.

Charles Sumner on Reconstruction and the South

Sumner's notes for “One Man Power vs. Congress” address accusing Johnson of jeopardizing the North’s cause and victory

The Contentious Election of 1876

By michael f. holt.

Understand the events that led to the Compromise of 1876 and the end of Reconstruction.

President Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address

Lincoln's reflections on the causes and meaning of the Civil War

On Juneteenth

By annette gordon-reed.

Examine the story of Juneteenth, which celebrates the end of slavery in the U.S., and specifically the day slavery ended in Texas – June 19, 1865. 

Lincoln’s Interpretation of the Civil War

Reflections on Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address and his views of the Civil War.

The Politics of Reconstruction

Watch a discussion of the politics of Reconstruction and the creation of new systems after the Civil War.

Reconstruction and Its Legacy

Watch a discussion of Reconstruction and the titanic changes that emerged from the Civil War.

Changing Views of Reconstruction

Watch a discussion of the evolving scholarly understanding of Reconstruction.

Reconstruction and the Battle for Woman Suffrage

By ellen dubois.

Gain an understanding of how Reconstruction affected the fight for women's suffrage.

Transcendentalism and Social Reform

By philip f. gura.

Learn how Transcendentalism influenced social reform.

American History Timeline: 1844-1877

Image citations.

Listed in order of appearance in the sections above

• Emigrant party on the road to California. United States, 1850. Photograph. Library of Congress Rare Book and Special Collections Division Washington, D.C. https://www.loc.gov/item/2002716775/.
• Greeley, Horace. Letter to R. L. Sanderson, November 15, 1871. The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, GLC00608.
• Mayer, Henry. "The Awakening." Puck, February 20, 1915. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
• Crofutt, George A. American Progress. Chicago, 1873. Chromolithograph. Based on a painting by John Gast. The Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
• Russell, Andrew J. "Echo City, Looking Up Weber River." In Union Pacific Railroad. Photographical Illustrations. New York, 1869. The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, GLC04348.
• Travis, William B. To the Citizens of Texas. February 28, 1836. San Felipe de Austin, TX. Broadside. The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, GLC03230.02.
• Currier & Ives. Battle of Buena Vista. Fought Feby. 23rd, 1847. In which the American Army under Genl. Taylor were Completely Victorious. New York, 1847. Lithograph. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
• "The Alamo" US postage stamp, issued June 14, 1956. National Postal Museum, Smithsonian Institution. 
• Texas. Unanimous Declaration of Independence by the Delegates of the People of Texas in General Convention, March 2, 1836. San Felipe de Austin: Baker and Bordens, 1836. Broadside. The Gilder Lehrman Institute of America nHistory, GLC02559.
• Berryman, Clifford Kennedy. Hand carving up a map of the Southwestern United States. Evening Star, March 4, 1917. Political cartoon. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
• Means, John, and R. E. Stanley. $2,500 Reward. St. Louis, August 23, 1852. Broadside. The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, GLC07238.
• Unknown. "Uncle Tom's Cabin" banner [on cloth]. s.l., after 1852. Textile. The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, GLC06894.
• Lincoln, Abraham. Notes for the "House Divided" Speech. Springfield, Illinois, ca. December 1857. The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, GLC02533.
• Auld, Hugh. Letter to Amy [Anna] Richardson, October 6, 1846. The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, GLC07484.04.
• Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Letter to Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, March 20, 1852.  The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, GLC01585.
• Bradford, Sarah H. Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman. Auburn NY: W. J. Moses, 1869. The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, GLC06840.
• The Scott Family: Eliza and Lizzie; Dred and Harriet in Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, June 27, 1857. Engravings based on photographs by John H. Fitzgibbon. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
• Thompson, Joseph Parrish. The Fugitive Slave Law: Tried by the Old and New Testaments. New York, 1850. The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, GLC00267.142.
• Weeden, Henry. Letter to Watson Freeman, December 4, 1850. The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, GLC09028.01.
• J. A. Beard & May. [Catalogue for the sale of enslaved people from Waverly and Meredith plantations]. New Orleans, Louisiana. March 1855. The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, GLC09340.
• Brownlow's Knoxville Whig, and Rebel Ventilator, January 30, 1864. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Library of Congress. 
• "The Road to Liberty: A Station on the Underground Railroad." s.l., ca. 1857. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division, New York Public Library. New York Public Library Digital Collections.
• Lincoln's address at the dedication of the Gettysburg National Cemetery. Pennsylvania Gettysburg, ca. 1905. Chicago: Sherwood Lithograph Co. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2003674448/.
• Doyle, Mahala. Letter to John Brown, November 20, 1859. The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, GLC07590.
• Brown, John. Address of John Brown to the Virginia Court, When About to Receive the Sentence of Death, for His Heroic Attempt at Harper's Ferry. Boston: The Liberator, December 1859. Broadside. The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, GLC05508.051.

The Election of 1860

• Charleston Mercury. The Union Is Dissolved! Charleston, December 20, 1860. Broadside. The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, GLC02688.
• South Carolina. Convention, 1860-1862. [South Carolina secession ordinance]. Charleston: Evans and Cogswell, [1860]. Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, GLC05987.15.
• Gardner, Alexander, photographer. President Abraham Lincoln, seated, with his left hand on his face. , ca. 1900. [probably taken 1863 Aug. 9; printed later] Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2013648773/.
• Bingham, George Caleb. Stump Speaking. New York: Goupil & Co., 1856. Hand-colored engraving. The Gilder Lehrman Institute Institute of American History, GLC04075.
• Lincoln, Abraham. The Address of the Hon. Abraham Lincoln ... at Cooper Institute, February 27th, 1860. New York: Young Men's Republican Union, 1860. The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, GLC00533.
• Lincoln, Abraham. Inaugural Address of the President of the United States, on the Fourth of March, 1861. Special sess. Senate. Ex. doc. no. 1. Washington DC, 1861. Pamphlet. The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, GLC01264.
• Kurz & Allison. Assault on Fort Sanders. Tennessee, 1891. Chicago: Kurz & Allison, Art Publishers. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/91721203/.
• Smith, William Morris. Company E, 4th U.S. Colored Infantry, at Fort Lincoln. Washington DC, 1865. Photograph. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
• Strobridge & Co. Abraham Lincoln and His Emancipation Proclamation / Cincinnati, 1888. Chromolithograph. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
• Lincoln, Abraham. [Emancipation Proclamation]. Philadelphia, 1864. Printed document. The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American Histoty, GLC00004.
• Bragg, Braxton. Letter to Henry J. Hunt, April 21, 1861. The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, GLC00925.01.
• US Congress. Copy of Proposed Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, amend. 13. Baltimore, 1861. The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, GLC09040.
• US War Department. Adjutant General's Office. General Orders No. 141. Washington DC: September 25, 1862. The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, GLC06099.
• Lincoln, Abraham. Respite of execution for slaver Nathaniel Gordon, February 4, 1862. The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, GLC00182.
• Currier & Ives. The Gallant Charge of the Fifty Fourth Massachusetts (Colored) Regiment. New York, 1893. Print. The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, GLC02881.23.
• Lincoln, Abraham. The President's dedication address at Gettysburg. New York: Miller & Mathews, 1863. The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, GLC06811.
• New York. Monuments Commission for the Battlefields of Gettysburg and Chattanooga. "Position of Union and Confederate Armies on the Morning of July 1, 1863." Final Report on the Battlefield of Gettysburg. Albany NY, 1900. The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, GLC00267.298.
• Stebbins, Lucius. Reading the Emancipation Proclamation. Hartford, 1864. Lithograph. The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, GLC07595.
• US War Department. Adjutant General's Office. General Orders No. 1 [Abraham Lincoln. The Emancipation Proclamation]. Washington DC, January 2, 1863. The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, GLC00460.
• Unknown. Fannie Virginia Casseopia Lawrence. ca. 1863. Photograph. The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, GLC09841.01.
• Only Seven Millions! Pennsylvania, 1866. Broadsheet. The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, GLC00329.
• Smith, Edward Parmelee. Incidents of the United States Christian Commission. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1869. The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, GLC00267.337. Homer, Winslow. Rainy Day in Camp. 1871. Oil on canvas. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
• Currier & Ives. Battle of Cedar Mountain, Aug. 9th 1862. New York, ca. 1862. Lithograph. The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, GLC02881.24.
• Sumner, Charles. "[One man power versus Congress] Address." ca. October 2, 1866. Manuscript. The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, GLC00496.088.01.
• Williams, [Unknown]. "Alas, the Woes of Childhood." (NY) Daily Graphic,  June 26, 1877. Courtesy of the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Library & Museum Collection.
• Gardner, Alexander. Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address. Washington DC, 1865. Photograph. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
• Frederick Dielman, “Celebration of the Abolition of Slavery in the District of Columbia by the Colored People, in Washington,”  Harper’s Weekly, May 12, 1866. (The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, GLC01733)
• Ehrgott, Forbriger & Co., Lithographer, and David Gilmour Blythe. President Lincoln, writing the Proclamation of Freedom. January 1st,/ painted by David Gilmour Blythe ; lithogr. and printed in colors by Ehrgott, Forbriger & Co. Cincinnati, O. , 1863. [Pittsburgh, Pa.: M. Depuy, no. 21 Wylie St., Pittsburgh, publisher] Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2004665377/.
• United States. Congress. Acts of Congress, General Orders, and Instructions for the Guidance of Boards of Registration in the Third Military District (Georgia, Alabama, and Florida). Atlanta, 1867. The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, GLC00349.
• Chicago Tribune, April 15, 1865, p1. The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, GLC00339.03.
• Cooper, Peter. Letter to John Sherman, May 12, 1866. The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, GLC00150.
• Anthony, Susan B. An Appeal to the Women of the United States by the National Woman Suffrage and Educational Committee. Hartford, 1871. The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, GLC08999.
• Whipple, John Adams. Ralph W. Emerson. Boston, ca. 1860. Carte de visite. The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, GLC05141.

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Civil War and Reconstruction

During the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln struggled to preserve the American constitutional republic and Union that ensured liberty and equality for all Americans. To that end, Lincoln brought the country to fight fought to preserve the Union against the secession of the South at his election in 1860. Lincoln also fought to end the moral disgrace of slavery and issued the Emancipation Proclamation during the war in 1863 as a war measure based upon his presidential war powers to weaken the South. At the end of the war, several amendments to the Constitution were ratified to advance the natural and civil rights republic of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution for African-Americans.

On March 4, 1865, President Lincoln delivered his Second Inaugural Address. The speech expressed the moral purposes of the war: “Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword” (Abraham Lincoln, “Second Inaugural Address,” March 4, 1865).

In the speech, Lincoln struck a tone of moderation and reconciliation with the South in restoring the Union. He also hoped that both sides would recognize the importance of equal rights for all Americans. “With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds…to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations”(Abraham Lincoln, “Second Inaugural Address,” March 4, 1865).

President Abraham Lincoln and the Republicans in Congress sought to secure an abolition amendment for several reasons. First, they wanted it to be the law of the land in the Constitution. Secondly, they knew that Lincoln’s executive authority over slavery would expire at the end of the war. Thirdly, the Emancipation Proclamation would probably face legal challenge in the courts and possibly be overturned. Fourthly, even if the proclamation survived, slavery would be unaffected in the border states of Kentucky, Missouri, and Delaware, not covered in the Emancipation Proclamation. Only a constitutional amendment would decisively end slavery in America, though it would not be easy since amending the Constitution required large majorities in Congress and the states. In April 1864, the Senate passed a constitutional amendment abolishing slavery, but it narrowly failed to achieve the requisite two-thirds majority in the House of Representatives.

In June 1864, Lincoln ran for re-election and demanded that the Republican party adopt a resolution for the abolition amendment in its platform. He succeeded, and the platform stated that, “as [slavery] must be, always and everywhere, hostile to the principles of Republican Government, justice and the National safety demand its utter and complete extirpation from the soil of the Republic,” this “gigantic evil” would be forever prohibited in the United States(Republican National Platform, 1864).

Lincoln won re-election in November1864, and he quickly tried to win support for the proposed amendment in his annual State of the Union message. Lincoln told the Congress and American people that the election results were a mandate for the amendment. “Of course the abstract question is not changed; but an intervening election shows almost certainly that the next Congress will pass the measure if this does not”(Abraham Lincoln, “Annual Message,” December 6, 1864)

On January 6, 1865, the House of Representatives took up debate on the amendment, while Lincoln and his Cabinet members traded political favors behind the scenes to secure votes. On January 31, the House narrowly passed the amendment by three votes. The following day, President Lincoln submitted a resolution to the states for ratification. Lincoln’s home state of Illinois ratified that day, and eighteen states ratified the amendment before the month ended.  On December 6, 1865, after Lincoln’s death, with the concurrence of several southern states, the amendment was ratified and became the law of the land.

The Thirteenth Amendment states: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction” (The United States Constitution, Thirteenth Amendment, 1865).

At the expense of more than 600,000 deaths in a bloody Civil War, the promise of liberty in the Declaration of Independence had finally been achieved for African-Americans. Slavery was expurgated from the country though much work was to be done before African-Americans enjoyed full equality in law and in custom.

Abraham Lincoln lived to see General Robert E. Lee’s surrender to General Ulysses S. Grant but would not live to see the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment. Lincoln was shot by an assassin on April 14, 1865 and died the following day. Among the many consequences of his death was the uncertain outcome of the Reconstruction, as it was called. Lincoln believed that the South had never left the Union and that southerners were rebels or insurrectionists. Therefore, he had favored a moderate plan of reconstruction whereby ten percent of the people of the Confederacy had to sign an oath of allegiance to the Union and the abolition amendment had to be ratified. Contrary to this mild proposal, the “Radical Republicans” in Congress demanded that the South be punished and passed the Wade-Davis Bill in 1864. This plan required an oath of loyalty by a majority of voters in each state, a ban on suffrage or office-holding by high-ranking Confederates, and the abolition of slavery. President Lincoln vetoed the bill. After Lincoln died, President Andrew Johnson supported a more lenient plan than Lincoln’s in which southern states would only have to repudiate the principle of secession and ratify the Thirteenth Amendment.

The division between President Johnson and the Radical Republicans in Congress set off a long struggle between the respective branches in government and affect the outcome of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments as well as the lives of African-Americans. Even as state legislatures were ratifying the Thirteenth Amendment, Southern states were passing “Black Codes,” that severely curtailed freedmen’s civil rights and reduced them to a state closely resembling slavery. In addition, President Johnson challenged the Radical Republicans in Congress over reconstruction and vetoed nearly any bill aiding in the equality of African-Americans or expressing congressional control over reconstruction. The Radical Republicans also believed (against Lincoln) that the southern states had left the Union and could only be readmitted by agreeing to grant African-Americans full civil equality. President Johnson had other ideas and, in February 1866, vetoed the Freedmen’s Bureau Bill, which would have started a federal agency intended to help freed slaves transition to freedom with education and jobs, and then a civil rights bill a month later. Congress overrode both vetoes, but black equality and liberty after the Civil War were lost amidst the constitutional struggle.

In order to guarantee black civil rights from the recalcitrant states and president, in June 1866, Congress passed the Fourteenth Amendment by a two-thirds majority in both houses and submitted it to the states for ratification without the courtesy of notifying President Johnson. In March 1867, Congress took even harsher steps to punish the South and enacted the Reconstruction Act, which divided the region into five military districts. The states would be readmitted into the Union when they ratified the Fourteenth Amendment and protected the rights of African-Americans. President Johnson vetoed the bill, but Congress overrode the veto.

In March, Congress also passed the Tenure of Office Act, which prevented President Johnson from circumventing the Reconstruction Act by removing officials governing the military districts. The president vetoed the measure, and Congress overrode the veto, but this was the last straw for Congress. The Radicals started to explore impeachment proceedings in the House Judiciary Committee.

Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution states, “The President, Vice President and all civil officers of the United States, shall be removed from office on impeachment for, and conviction of, treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors” (The United States Constitution, Article I, Section 4, 1787).

The rationale for impeaching Johnson for misusing the presidential veto was weak because the evidence for high crimes did not exist.  As a result, the impeachment attempt was not succeeding.  In the summer of 1867, Johnson sought to remove Secretary of War Edwin Stanton from office, and Congress moved to impeach the president.

On February 21, 1868, President Johnson officially removed Stanton from office. Two days later, the House voted to impeach Johnson by a vote of 128 to 47. In order to be constitutionally removed from office, the Senate would have to hold a trial against the president presided over by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court according to Article I, Section 3 of the Constitution. “The Senate shall have the sole power to try all impeachments. When sitting for that purpose, they shall be on oath or affirmation. When the President of the United States is tried, the Chief Justice shall preside: And no person shall be convicted without the concurrence of two thirds of the members present” (The United States Constitution, Article I, Section 3, 1787). When the vote was taken, moderate Republicans broke ranks because of the weakness of the argument and evidence, and Johnson kept his office by a single vote. Former Union general Ulysses S. Grant was elected president months later.

In July 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified by three-fourths of the states.  It provided national citizenship, the protection of privileges and immunities within the states, a due process clause, and equal protection of the laws.

Section 1 read: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws” (The United States Constitution, Fourteenth Amendment, Section 1, 1866).

In February 1869, Congress passed the Fifteenth Amendment, and it was ratified by three-fourths of the states one year later. It stated, “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude” (The United States Constitution, Fifteenth Amendment, 1869). Although African-Americans soon made up the majority of voters in some southern states and even elected some black representatives to Congress, the right to vote was curtailed by southern states through a several legal devices including poll taxes, literacy tests, and grandfather clauses, as well as by plain intimidation of blacks attempting to vote. Paying taxes or passing a reading test to vote hurt poor, illiterate whites (though it was not always administered against them) as well as blacks. The grandfather clause hurt only African-Americans and banned anyone from voting whose grandfather had been a slave, which effectively banned most freed men from voting.

Despite the great successes of the Civil War Amendments in winning liberty and equality for African-Americans, they found themselves suffering many restrictions of their rights in the decades after the Civil War. They lived in perpetual debt with sharecropper farming, violence by groups like the Ku Klux Klan, voting restrictions, and even legal segregation (separation of the races) in Jim Crow laws and the infamous Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) Supreme Court decision which ruled in favor of the constitutionality of those statutes of inequality.  Separate was held to be acceptable if the institutions were equal, though they relegated African-Americans to an inferior status.

In the original debate over the Constitution, James Madison feared that the greatest threat to liberty in a republic came from popular majorities.

“Wherever the real power in a Government lies, there is the danger of oppression,” Madison wrote, “In our Governments the real power lies in the majority of the Community, and the invasion of private rights is chiefly to be apprehended…from acts in which the Government is the mere instrument of the major number of the constituents” (James Madison to Thomas Jefferson, October 17, 1788).

He also feared popular passions in a republic. African-Americans in the post-Civil War-South discovered first-hand the dangers of majority tyranny in a republic whatever constitutional protections they had won. It would be almost a century until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 arguments for liberty and equality for African-Americans would win acceptance as, in Madison’s words, “fundamental maxims of free government” (James Madison to Thomas Jefferson, October 17, 1788).

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Reconstruction offered a glimpse of equality for Black Americans. Why did it fail?

During the Reconstruction era, the U.S. abolished slavery and guaranteed Black men the right to vote. But it was marred by tragedy and political infighting—and ended with a disastrous backlash.

Members of the first South Carolina legislature after the Civil War. Approximately 2,000 Black men were elected to office during the post-war Reconstruction period, which briefly provided political and social power to formerly enslaved people before a backlash ushered in an era of segregation.

On April 11, 1865, U.S. President Abraham Lincoln spoke to an ecstatic crowd at the White House. In the last speech he ever gave, Lincoln could have waxed poetic about Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s recent surrender and the impending end of America’s bloodiest conflict. Instead, he made a case for stitching the country back together after the Civil War by restoring rebel states to the Union and undoing the evils of slavery.

“Let us all join in doing the acts necessary to restoring the proper practical relations between [Confederate] states and the Union,” Lincoln said. “I believe it is not only possible, but in fact, easier, to do this, without deciding, or even considering, whether these states have even been out of the Union.”

The ensuing period of reform and rebuilding, known as Reconstruction, briefly succeeded in providing Black people with political and social power. But it was marred by tragedy, political infighting, and a disastrous backlash that set the stage for more than a century of segregation and voter suppression.

Lincoln’s vision for Reconstruction

Plans to readmit Confederate states to the Union began long before the war’s end. Lincoln wanted to make it easy for them to return, fearing that too harsh a plan would make reunification impossible.

In December 1863, the Republican president issued a proclamation that offered to reinstate former Confederate states once 10 percent of their voters pledged allegiance to the Union and promised to adhere to the Emancipation Proclamation, which declared that the United States would “recognize and maintain” the freedom of all people enslaved in seceded states. Those who took the oath would be pardoned, and states that cleared the bar could draft new constitutions and convene state governments.

President Abraham Lincoln signs the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, declaring that all enslaved people within the rebel states would be freed. It would take another two years to abolish slavery throughout the nation with the passage of the 13th Amendment.

But a group of congressmen and senators known as Radical Republicans disliked the plan, both for its perceived lenience to the rebels, and because it didn’t provide formerly enslaved people any civil rights aside from their freedom. Their response, the 1864 Wade-Davis Bill , would have required half of a state’s voters to take a loyalty oath and swear they had never voluntarily taken up arms against the Union. Former Confederates would be stripped of their right to vote, while formerly enslaved Black men would gain it. However, Lincoln thought the plan was too punitive and refused to sign it.

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As Confederate defeat became inevitable, Union leaders turned their attention to the future prosperity of enslaved people. In January 1865, General William Tecumseh Sherman issued an order to seize land from slaveholders in occupied Georgia and South Carolina and divide it among freedmen. Although the policy didn’t mention farm animals, it became known as the “40 acres and a mule” pledge.

Congress also set out to enshrine emancipation in the Constitution by passing the 13th Amendment on January 31, 1865, abolishing slavery. Lincoln made it clear that in order to rejoin the Union, Confederate states would have to agree to ratify the amendment. In March, at Lincoln’s behest, Congress created the Freedmen’s Bureau , a dedicated agency that would provide education, food, and assistance to emancipated people and oversee the division of land.

President Johnson’s leniency and the Black Codes

Tragedy reshaped the trajectory of Reconstruction—and ultimately undermined its promise. On April 15, 1865—just days after his final speech—Lincoln was assassinated and his vice president, Andrew Johnson, became president.

Although Johnson was a southern Democrat and a former enslaver who had joined Lincoln on a unity ticket, most Republicans expected him to continue Lincoln’s agenda. They underestimated Johnson’s racism and southern sympathies: Johnson’s vision for Reconstruction included blanket pardons for most former Confederates, including many high-level officials, and a lenient stance toward rebel states. He made no attempt to integrate Black people into southern institutions.

Johnson allowed former Confederate states to create all-white governments. When Congress reconvened in December 1865, its new members included many high-ranking Confederates, including former Vice President of the Confederacy Alexander Hamilton Stephens. Although Congress refused to admit them, Johnson had made his sympathies clear.

William Andrew Johnson—pictured here during a 1937 visit to Washington, D.C.—was the last living person to have been enslaved by a U.S. president: Andrew Johnson. Although Johnson freed the people he had enslaved before taking office, he remained sympathetic to former slave states after the Civil War.

His leniency would have disastrous consequences for Black people in the South, where former Confederates quickly established a slavery-like system to ensure white dominance and exploit Black labor.

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In November 1865, Mississippi’s all-white legislature enacted a set of draconian laws called Black Codes, which curtailed Black people’s ability to own or rent property, move freely, control their own employment, and marry. Harsh penalties included forced, unpaid labor, seizure of possessions, and even the removal of children, who could be “apprenticed” to former slaveholders. All white people could legally enforce the codes.

The codes prompted other former Confederate states to enact copycat laws. In response, Radical Republicans in Congress introduced the nation’s first civil rights law, the Civil Rights Act of 1866 . It granted citizenship to all non-Native American men born in the United States, regardless of race or former servitude, and guaranteed they would benefit from all laws concerning “the security of person and property.” When Johnson vetoed the bill, Congress overrode it.

Congressional Reconstruction begins

Empowered by an election that swayed Congressional power in their direction, Radical Republicans took the reins of Reconstruction in 1866 and began undoing Johnson’s policies.

In 1867 and 1868, Congress passed four Reconstruction Acts establishing military rule in former Confederate states and revoking some high-ranking Confederates’ right to vote and hold office. In order to reestablish ties to the Union, rebel states had to let Congress review their constitutions, extend voting rights to all men, and ratify the 13 th and 14 th Amendments.

The 14 th Amendment , adopted in July 1868, granted citizenship to all people born or naturalized in the United States, forbade states from depriving any person of “life, liberty, or property, without due process of law,” and provided all people equal protection under the law.

Although citizenship technically guaranteed Black men the right to vote, most were kept from southern polls through violence and intimidation. The 15 th Amendment , ratified in February 1870, made it unconstitutional to abridge someone’s right to vote because of their race.

On March 31, 1870, Thomas Mundy Peterson of Perth Amboy, New Jersey, became the first African American to vote in an election under the just-enacted provisions of the 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

The Reconstruction Acts and Reconstruction Amendments reshaped the political structure of the South. Two sets of white Republican operatives rose to prominence: the derisively named “carpetbaggers,” who had moved south after the war, and “scalawags,” white Southerners who supported the rise of Black Southerners’ political power. ( Today ‘physical symbols of white supremacy’ are coming down. What changed? )

Men who had once been enslaved now constituted a political majority throughout much of the South—and most were fervent Republicans. Hundreds of thousands of Black men registered to vote, and between 1863 and 1877, about 2,000 served were elected to public office. Among them were South Carolina’s Joseph H. Rainey , a formerly enslaved man who in 1869 became the first Black U.S. Congressman, and Mississippi’s Hiram Revels , a freeborn man who became the first Black U.S. Senator in 1870.

White backlash and the dismantling of Reconstruction

White Southerners resented what they saw as overly punitive policies and argued that Black people were racially inferior and unfit to govern. This white backlash spawned paramilitaries and hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan, which terrorized Black lawmakers and would-be voters. White Southerners carried out mass lynchings , attempted to overthrow Reconstruction governments, and fought their policies in court. ( Here's how the Confederate battle flag became an enduring symbol of racism. )

In the early 1870s, an economic depression and political scandals tarnished the Republican party’s reputation, giving Democrats a chance to regain power and end Reconstruction. The 1876 presidential election was bitterly contested amid allegations of voter suppression and tampering on both sides. After months of deadlock, southern Democrats made a backroom deal to accept Republican Rutherford B. Hayes’ win over Democrat Samuel Tilden in exchange for an end to Reconstruction.

As federal oversight of southern states ended, so did the protections that had allowed Black people to exercise their political and social rights. White lawmakers—many the same Confederate leaders who had formed all-white legislatures under Johnson—swiftly dismantled Reconstruction policies and enacted cruel “ Jim Crow ” laws that reestablished white rule. Jim Crow laws segregated social spaces, criminalized interaction between races, and disenfranchised Black voters through poll taxes, literacy tests, and other barriers.

Ultimately, the promise of Reconstruction offered Black Southerners only a fleeting taste of freedom. But the opportunities it so briefly enabled still resonate today. In the words of historian George Lipsitz, it was “a victory without victory”—a failure with disastrous consequences that nonetheless sowed the potential for future change.

It would take nearly a century for the civil rights movement to prompt legislation that ensured voting rights for all and spur other social reforms. More than a century and a half later, Black Americans still face deep disparities in everything from policing to homeownership , economic opportunity , education , and health . But Reconstruction also made it clear that with institutional and social will, racial equality could one day be achieved and protected.

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"Of the essays included in this volume all but one--that on 'The process of reconstruction'--have been published before during the last eleven years: four in the Political Science Quarterly, one in the Yale Review, and one in the 'Papers of the American Historical Association.'"--Pref.

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• B.S., Texas A&M University

The Reconstruction era was a period of healing and rebuilding in the Southern United States following the American Civil War (1861-1865) that played a critical role in the history of civil rights and racial equality in America. During this tumultuous time, the U.S. government attempted to deal with the reintegration of the 11 Southern states that had seceded from the Union, along with 4 million newly freed enslaved people.

Reconstruction demanded answers to a multitude of difficult questions. On what terms would the Confederate states be accepted back into the Union? How were for former Confederate leaders, considered traitors by many in the North, to be dealt with? And perhaps most momentously, did emancipation mean that Black people were to enjoy the same legal and social status as White people?

Fast Facts: Reconstruction Era

• Short Description: The period of recovery and rebuilding in the Southern United States following the American Civil War
• Key Players: U.S. Presidents Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Johnson, and Ulysses S. Grant; U.S. Senator Charles Sumner
• Event Start Date: December 8, 1863
• Event End Date: March 31, 1877
• Location: Southern United States of America

In 1865 and 1866, during the administration of President Andrew Johnson , the Southern states enacted restrictive and discriminatory Black Codes —laws intended to control the behavior and labor of Black Americans. Outrage over these laws in Congress led to the replacement of Johnson’s so-called Presidential Reconstruction approach with that of the more radical wing of the Republican Party . The ensuing period known as Radical Reconstruction resulted in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1866 , which for the first time in American history gave Black people a voice in government. By the mid-1870s, however, extremist forces—such as the Ku Klux Klan —succeeded in restoring many aspects of white supremacy in the South.

Reconstruction After the Civil War

As a Union victory became more of certainty, America’s struggle with Reconstruction began before the end of the Civil War. In 1863, months after signing his Emancipation Proclamation , President Abraham Lincoln introduced his Ten Percent Plan for Reconstruction. Under the plan, if one-tenth of a Confederate state’s prewar voters signed an oath of loyalty to the Union, they be would be allowed to form a new state government with the same constitutional rights and powers they had enjoyed before secession.

More than a blueprint for rebuilding the postwar South, Lincoln saw the Ten Percent Plan as a tactic for further weakening the resolve of the Confederacy. After none of the Confederate states agreed to accept the plan, Congress in 1864 passed the Wade-Davis Bill , barring the Confederate states from rejoining the Union until a majority of the state’s voters had sworn their loyalty. Though Lincoln pocket vetoed the bill, he and many of his fellow Republicans remained convinced that equal rights for all formerly enslaved Black persons had to be a condition of a state’s readmission to the Union. On April 11, 1865, in his last speech before his assassination , Lincoln express his opinion that some “very intelligent” Black men or Black men who had joined the Union army deserved the right to vote. Notably, no consideration for the rights of Black women was expressed during Reconstruction.

Presidential Reconstruction

Taking office in April 1865, following the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, President Andrew Johnson ushered in a two-year-long period known as Presidential Reconstruction. Johnson’s plan for restoring the splintered Union pardoned all Southern White persons except Confederate leaders and wealthy plantation owners and restored all of their constitutional rights and property except enslaved persons.

To be accepted back into the Union, the former Confederate states were required to abolish the practice of slavery, renounce their secession, and compensate the federal government for its Civil War expenses. Once these conditions were met, however, the newly restored Southern states were allowed to manage their governments and legislative affairs. Given this opportunity, the Southern states responded by enacting a series of racially discriminatory laws known as the Black Codes.

Black Codes

Enacted during 1865 and 1866, the Black Codes were laws intended to restrict the freedom of Black Americans in the South and ensure their continued availability as a cheap labor force even after the abolishment of slavery during the Civil War.

All Black persons living in the states that enacted Black Code laws were required to sign yearly labor contracts. Those who refused or were otherwise unable to do so could be arrested, fined, and if unable to pay their fines and private debts, forced to perform unpaid labor. Many Black children—especially those without parental support—were arrested and forced into unpaid labor for white planters.

The restrictive nature and ruthless enforcement of the Black Codes drew the outrage and resistance of Black Americans and seriously reduced Northern support for President Johnson and the Republican Party. Perhaps more significant to the eventual outcome of Reconstruction, the Black Codes gave the more radical arm of the Republican Party renewed influence in Congress.

Radical Republicans

Arising around 1854, before the Civil War, the Radical Republicans were a faction within the Republican Party who demanded the immediate, complete and permanent eradication of slavery. During the Civil War, they were opposed by the moderate Republicans, including President Abraham Lincoln, and by pro-slavery Democrats and Northern liberals until the end of Reconstruction in 1877.

After the Civil War, the Radical Republicans pushed for full implementation of emancipation through the immediate and unconditional establishment of civil rights for formerly enslaved persons. After the Reconstruction measures of President Andrew Johnson in 1866 resulted in the continued abuse of formerly enslaved Blacks in the South, the Radical Republicans pushed for the enactment of the Fourteenth Amendment and civil rights laws. They opposed allowing former Confederate military officers in the Southern states to hold elected offices and pressed for granting “freedmen,” people who had been enslaved before emancipation.

Influential Radical Republicans such as Representative Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania and Senator Charles Sumner from Massachusetts demanded that the new governments of the Southern states be based on racial equality and the granting of universal voting rights for all male residents regardless of race. However, the more moderate Republican majority in Congress favored working with President Johnson to modify his Reconstruction measures. In early 1866, Congress refused to recognize or seat representatives and senators who had been elected from the former Confederate states of the South and passed the Freedmen’s Bureau and Civil Rights Bills.

Civil Rights Bill of 1866 and Freedmen’s Bureau

Enacted by Congress on April 9, 1866, over President Johnson’s veto , the Civil Rights Bill of 1866 became America’s first civil rights legislation. The bill mandated that all male persons born in the United States, except for American Indians, regardless of their “race or color, or previous condition of slavery or involuntary servitude” were “declared to be citizens of the United States” in every state and territory. The bill thus granted all citizens the “full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings for the security of person and property.”

Believing the federal government should take an active role in creating a multiracial society in the postwar South, the Radical Republicans saw the bill as a logical next step in Reconstruction. Taking a more anti-federalist stance, however, President Johnson vetoed the bill, calling it “another step, or rather a stride, toward centralization and the concentration of all legislative power in the national Government.” In overriding Johnson’s veto, lawmakers set the stage for a showdown between Congress and the president over the future of the former Confederacy and the civil rights of Black Americans.

The Freedmen’s Bureau

In March 1865, Congress, at the recommendation of President Abraham Lincoln, enacted the Freedmen’s Bureau Act creating a U.S. government agency to oversee the end of slavery in the South by providing food, clothing, fuel, and temporary housing to newly freed enslaved persons and their families.

During the Civil War, Union forces had confiscated vast areas of farmland owned by Southern plantation owners. Known as the “ 40 acres and a mule ” provision, part of Lincoln’s Freedmen’s Bureau Act authorized the bureau to rent or sell land this land to formerly enslaved persons. However, in the summer of 1865, President Johnson ordered all of this federally controlled land to be returned to its former White owners. Now lacking land, most formerly enslaved persons were forced to return to working on the same plantations where they had toiled for generations. While they now worked for minimal wages or as sharecroppers, they had little hope of achieving the same economic mobility enjoyed by White citizens. For decades, most Southern Black people were forced to remain propertyless and mired in poverty.

Reconstruction Amendments

Although President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation had ended the practice of slavery in the Confederate states in 1863, the issue remained at the national level. To be allowed to reenter the Union, the former Confederate states were required to agree to abolish slavery, but no federal law had been enacted to prevent those states from simply reinstituting the practice through their new constitutions. Between 1865 and 1870, the U.S. Congress addressed passed and the states ratified a series of three Constitutional amendments that abolished slavery nationwide and addressed other inequities in the legal and social status of all Black Americans.

Thirteenth Amendment

On February 8, 1864, with the Union victory in the Civil War virtually ensured, Radical Republicans led by Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts and Representative Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania introduced a resolution calling for the adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Passed by Congress on January 31, 1865, and ratified by the states on December 6, 1865—the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery “within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” The former Confederate states were required to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment as a condition of regaining their pre-secession representation in Congress.

Fourteenth Amendment 

Ratified on July 9, 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment granted citizenship to all persons “born or naturalized in the United States,” including formerly enslaved persons. Extending the protections of the Bill of Rights to the states, the Fourteenth Amendment also provided all citizens regardless of race or former condition of enslavement with “equal protection under the laws” of the United States. It further ensures that no citizen’s right to “life, liberty, or property” will be denied without due process of law . States that unconstitutionally attempted to restrict their citizens’ right to vote could be punished by having their representation in Congress reduced.

Finally, in granting Congress the power to enforce its provisions, the Fourteenth Amendment enabled the enactment of landmark 20th-century racial equality legislation, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964 , and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 .

Fifteenth Amendment

Shortly after the election of President Ulysses S. Grant on March 4, 1869, Congress approved the Fifteenth Amendment , prohibiting the states from restricting the right to vote because of race.

Ratified on February 3, 1870, the Fifteenth Amendment prohibited the states from limiting the voting rights of their male citizens “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” However, the amendment did not prohibit the states from enacting restrictive voter qualifications laws that applied equally to all races. Many former Confederate states took advantage of this omission by instituting poll taxes, literacy tests , and “ grandfather clauses ” clearly intended to prevent Black persons from voting. Though always controversial, these discriminatory practices would be allowed to continue until the enactment of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Congressional or Radical Reconstruction

In the 1866 mid-term congressional elections , Northern voters overwhelmingly rejected President Johnson’s Reconstruction policies, giving Radical Republicans nearly total control of Congress. Now controlling both the House of Representatives and the Senate, Radical Republicans were assured the votes needed to override any of Johnson’s vetoes to their soon-to-come Reconstruction legislation. This political uprising ushered in the period of Congressional or Radical Reconstruction.

The Reconstruction Acts

Enacted during 1867 and 1868, the Radical Republican-sponsored Reconstruction Acts specified the conditions under which the formerly seceded Southern states of the Confederacy would be readmitted to the Union after the Civil War.

Enacted in March 1867, the First Reconstruction Act, also known as the Military Reconstruction Act, divided the former Confederate states into five Military Districts, each governed by a Union general. The Act placed the Military Districts under martial law, with Union troops deployed to keep the peace and protect formerly enslaved persons.

The Second Reconstruction Act, enacted on March 23, 1867, supplemented the First Reconstruction Act by assigning Union troops to oversee voter registration and voting in the Southern states.

The deadly 1866 New Orleans and Memphis Race Riots had convinced Congress that Reconstruction policies needed to be enforced. By creating “radical regimes” and enforcing martial law throughout the South, the Radical Republicans hoped to facilitate their Radical Reconstruction plan. Though most Southern White people hated the “regimes” and being overseen by Union troops, the Radical Reconstruction policies resulted in all of the Southern states being readmitted to the Union by the end of 1870.  

When Did Reconstruction End?

During the 1870s, the Radical Republicans began to back away from their expansive definition of the power of the federal government. Democrats argued that the Republican’s Reconstruction plan’s exclusion of the South’s “best men”—the White plantation owners—from political power was to blame for much of the violence and corruption in the region. The effectiveness of the Reconstruction Acts and constitutional amendments was further diminished by a series of Supreme Court decisions, beginning in 1873.

An economic depression from 1873 to 1879 saw much of the South fell into poverty, allowing the Democratic Party to win back control of the House of Representatives and heralding the end Reconstruction. By 1876, the legislatures of only three Southern states: South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana remained under Republican control. The outcome of the 1876 presidential election between Republican Rutherford B. Hayes and Democrat Samuel J. Tilden, was decided by disputed vote counts from those three states. After a controversial compromise saw Hayes's inaugurate president, Union troops were withdrawn from all Southern states. With the federal government no longer responsible for protecting the rights of the formerly enslaved people, Reconstruction had ended.

However, unforeseen results of the period from 1865 to 1876 would continue to impact Black Americans and the societies of both the South and North for over a century.

Reconstruction in the South

In the South, Reconstruction brought a massive, often painful, social, and political transition. While nearly four million formerly enslaved Black Americans gained freedom and some political power, those gains were diminished by lingering poverty and racist laws such as the Black Codes of 1866 and the Jim Crow laws of 1887.

Though freed from slavery, most Black Americans in the South remained hopelessly mired in rural poverty. Having been denied educations under slavery, many formerly enslaved people were forced by economic necessity to

Despite being free, most southern Black Americans continued to live in desperate rural poverty. Having been denied education and wages under slavery, ex-slaves were often forced by the necessity of their economic circumstances to return to or remain with their former White slave owners, working on their plantations for minimal wages or as sharecroppers .

According to historian Eugene Genovese, over 600,000 formerly enslaved persons stayed with their masters. As Black activists and scholar W.E.B. Du Bois wrote, the “slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.”

As a result of Reconstruction, Black citizens in the Southern states gained the right to vote. In many congressional districts across the South, Black people comprised a majority of the population. In 1870, Joseph Rainey of South Carolina was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, becoming the first popularly elected Black member of Congress. Though they never achieved representation proportionate to their total number, some 2,000 Black held elected office from the local to national level during Reconstruction.

In 1874, Black members of Congress, led by South Carolina Representative Robert Brown Elliot, were instrumental in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1875 , outlawing discrimination based on race in hotels, theaters, and railway cars.

However, the growing political power of Black people provoked a violent backlash from many White people who struggled to hold on to their supremacy . By implementing racially motivated voter disenfranchisement measures such as poll taxes and literacy tests, Whites in the South succeeded in undermining the very purpose of Reconstruction. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments went largely unenforced, setting the stage for the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

Reconstruction in the North

Reconstruction in the South meant a massive social and political upheaval and a devastated economy. By contrast, the Civil War and Reconstruction brought opportunities for progress and growth. Passed during the Civil War, economic stimulus legislation such as the Homestead Act and the Pacific Railway Act opened the Western territories to waves of settlers .

Debates over the newly acquired voting rights for Black Americans helped drive the women’s suffrage movement , which eventually succeeded with the election of Jeannette Rankin of Montana to the U.S. Congress in 1917 and the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920.

The Legacy of Reconstruction

Though they were repeatedly either ignored or flagrantly violated, the anti-racial discrimination Reconstruction amendments remained in the Constitution. In 1867, U.S. Senator Charles Sumner had prophetically called them “sleeping giants” that would be awakened by future generations of Americans struggling to at last bring true freedom and equality to the descendants of slavery. Not until the civil rights movement of the 1960s—aptly called the “Second Reconstruction”—did America again attempt to fulfill the political and social promises of Reconstruction.

• Berlin, Ira. “Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South.” Oxford University Press, 1981, ISBN-10 : 1565840283.
• Du Bois, W. E. B. “Black Reconstruction in America.” Transaction Publishers, 2013, ISBN:1412846676.
• Berlin, Ira, editor. “Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867.” University of North Carolina Press (1982), ISBN: 978-1-4696-0742-9.
• Lynch, John R. “The Facts of Reconstruction.” The Neale Publishing Company (1913), http://www.gutenberg.org/files/16158/16158-h/16158-h.htm.
• Fleming, Walter L. “Documentary History of Reconstruction: Political, Military, Social, Religious, Educational, and Industrial.” Palala Press (April 22, 2016), ISBN-10: 1354267508.
• Timeline of the Reconstruction Era
• Black History Timeline: 1865–1869
• 14th Amendment Summary
• The Wade-Davis Bill and Reconstruction
• Biography of Andrew Johnson, 17th President of the United States
• Thaddeus Stevens
• The Black Struggle for Freedom
• 10 Facts to Know About Andrew Johnson
• The Black Codes and Why They Still Matter Today
• Black History and Women Timeline 1860-1869
• The Jim Crow Era
• The American Civil War and Secession
• What Is a Literacy Test?
• Women's Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment
• The History of Juneteenth Celebrations

Open Yale Courses

You are here, the civil war and reconstruction era, 1845-1877.

This course explores the causes, course, and consequences of the American Civil War, from the 1840s to 1877. The primary goal of the course is to understand the multiple meanings of a transforming event in American history. Those meanings may be defined in many ways: national, sectional, racial, constitutional, individual, social, intellectual, or moral. Four broad themes are closely examined: the crisis of union and disunion in an expanding republic; slavery, race, and emancipation as national problem, personal experience, and social process; the experience of modern, total war for individuals and society; and the political and social challenges of Reconstruction.

This Yale College course, taught on campus twice per week for 50 minutes, was recorded for Open Yale Courses in Spring 2008.

Bruce Levine,  Half Slave and Half Free: The Roots of the Civil War.  Hill and Wang.

David Blight,  Why the Civil War Came.  New York: Oxford University.

Charles R. Dew,  Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War.  University of Virginia Press.

Drew G. Faust,  Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War.  University of North Carolina Press.

E. L. Doctorow,  The March.  Random House.

Eric Foner,  A Short History of Reconstruction, 1863-1877.  Harper & Row.

Frederick Douglass,  Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, ed. by David W. Blight.  Bedford Books.

Gary Gallagher,  The Confederate War: How Popular Will, Nationalism, and Military Strategy Could Not Stave Off Defeat. Harvard University Press.

James M. McPherson,  Battle Cry of Freedom.  Oxford University Press.

Louisa May Alcott,  Hospital Sketches, ed. by Alice Fahs.  Bedford Books.

Michael P. Johnson, ed.,  Abraham Lincoln, Slavery, and the Civil War.  Bedford Books.

Nicholas Lemann,  Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War.  Farrar Strauss Giroux.

William Gienapp, ed.,  Civil War and Reconstruction: A Documentary Collection.  Norton.

We are using two anthologies of documents (Gienapp and Johnson). Teaching Assistants will have discretion in assigning particular documents for each week’s sections, and many such documents will be especially important for use in paper assignments. James McPherson’s  Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era  is provided largely as background reading. For further background reading on the post-war period you may want to consult David W. Blight,  Race and Reunion: The Civil War In American Memory.

Films will be scheduled during the course: especially several episodes of the PBS series, “The Civil War.” The film, “Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Civil War,” will also be assigned. Selections of Civil War era poetry may also be provided at times during the course.

There will be two required papers of 5-6 pages each. Choices of topics and readings will be provided in each of two broad categories or sections of the course: 1) antebellum society and Civil War causation; and, 2) the military, political, and social meanings of the Civil War itself. The challenges, accomplishments, and failures of the Reconstruction era will be a significant part of a scheduled, final examination during finals week.

Paper 1: 30% Paper 2: 30% Final exam: 30% Discussion section attendance and participation: 10%

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Civil War Reconstruction

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How Reconstruction Still Shapes American Racism

D uring an interview with Chris Rock for my PBS series ­African American Lives 2 , we traced the ancestry of several well-known African Americans. When I told Rock that his great-great-­grandfather Julius Caesar Tingman had served in the U.S. Colored Troops during the Civil War — enrolling on March 7, 1865, a little more than a month after the Confederates evacuated from Charleston, S.C. — he was brought to tears. I explained that seven years later, while still a young man in his mid-20s, this same ancestor was elected to the South Carolina house of representatives as part of that state’s Reconstruction government. Rock was flabbergasted, his pride in his ancestor rivaled only by gratitude that Julius’ story had been revealed at last. “It’s sad that all this stuff was kind of buried and that I went through a whole childhood and most of my adulthood not knowing,” Rock said. “How in the world could I not know this?”

I realized then that even descendants of black heroes of Reconstruction had lost the memory of their ancestors’ heroic achievements. I have been interested in Reconstruction and its tragic aftermath since I was an undergraduate at Yale University, and I have been teaching works by black authors from the second half of the 19th century for decades. But the urgent need for a broader public conversation about the period first struck me only in that conversation with Rock.

Reconstruction, the period in American history that followed the Civil War, was an era filled with great hope and expectations, but it proved far too short to ensure a successful transition from bondage to free labor for the almost 4 million black human beings who’d been born into slavery in the U.S. During Reconstruction, the U.S. government maintained an active presence in the former Confederate states to protect the rights of the newly freed slaves and to help them, however incompletely, on the path to becoming full citizens. A little more than a decade later, the era came to an end when the contested presidential election of 1876 was resolved by trading the electoral votes of South Carolina, Louisiana and Florida for the removal of federal troops from the last Southern statehouses.

Today, many of us know precious little about what happened during those years. But, regardless of its brevity, Reconstruction remains one of the most pivotal eras in the history of race relations in American history —­ and probably the most misunderstood.

Reconstruction was fundamentally about who got to be an American citizen. It was in that period that the Constitution was amended to establish birthright citizenship through the 14th Amendment, which also guaranteed equality before the law regardless of race. The 15th Amendment, ratified in 1870, barred racial discrimination in voting, thus securing the ballot for black men nationwide. As Eric Foner, the leading historian of the era, puts it, “The issues central to Reconstruction —­ citizenship, voting rights, terrorist violence, the relationship between economic and political democracy ­— continue to roil our society and ­politics today, making an understanding of Reconstruction even more vital.” A key lesson of Reconstruction, and of its violent, racist rollback, is, Foner continues, “that achievements thought permanent can be overturned and rights can never be taken for granted.”

Another lesson this era of our history teaches us is that, even when stripped of their rights by courts, legislatures and revised state constitutions, African Americans never surrendered to white supremacy. Resistance, too, is their legacy.

By 1877 , in a climate of economic crisis, the “cost” of protecting the freedoms of African Americans became a price the American government was no longer willing to pay. The long rollback began in earnest­: the period of retrenchment, voter suppression, Jim Crow segregation and quasi re-enslavement that was called by white Southerners, ironically, “Redemption.” As a worried ­Frederick Douglass, sensing the storm clouds gathering on the horizon, put it in a speech at the Republican National Convention on June 14, 1876: “You say you have emancipated us. You have; and I thank you for it. You say you have enfranchised us; and I thank you for it. But what is your ­emancipation? — What is your enfranchisement? What does it all amount to if the black man, after having been made free by the letter of your law, is unable to exercise that freedom, and, after having been freed from the slaveholder’s lash, he is to be subject to the slaveholder’s shotgun?”

What confounds me is how much longer the rollback of Reconstruction was than Reconstruction itself, how dogged was the determination of the “Redeemed South” to obliterate any trace of the gains made by freed people. In South Carolina, for example, the state university that had been integrated during Reconstruction (indeed, Harvard’s first black college graduate, Richard T. Greener, was a professor there) was swiftly shut down and reopened three years later for whites only. That color line remained in place there until 1963.

In addition to their moves to strip African Americans of their voting rights, “Redeemer” governments across the South slashed government investments in infrastructure and social programs across the board, including those for the region’s first state-funded public-school systems, a product of Reconstruction. In doing so, they re-empowered a private sphere dominated by the white planter class. A new wave of state constitutional conventions followed, starting with Mississippi in 1890. These effectively undermined the Reconstruction Amendments, especially the right of black men to vote, in each of the former Confederate states by 1908. To take just one example: whereas in Louisiana, 130,000 black men were registered to vote before the state instituted its new constitution in 1898, by 1904 that number had been reduced to 1,342.

And at what the historian Rayford W. Logan dubbed the “nadir” of American race relations—the time of political, economic, social and legal hardening around segregation — widespread violence, disenfranchisement and lynching coincided with a hardening of racist concepts of “race.”

This painfully long period following Reconstruction saw the explosion of white-supremacist ideology across an array of media and through an extraordinary variety of forms, all designed to warp the mind toward white-supremacist beliefs. Minstrelsy and racist visual imagery were weapons in the battle over the status of African Americans in postslavery America, and some continue to be manufactured to this day.

The process of dehumanization triggered a resistance movement. Among a rising generation of the black elite, this resistance was represented after 1895 through the concept of “The New Negro,” a counter to the avalanche of racist images of black people that proliferated throughout Gilded Age American society in advertisements, posters and postcards, helped along by technological innovations that enabled the cheap mass production of multicolored prints. Not surprisingly, racist images of black people­ — characterized by exaggerated physical features, the blackest of skin tones, the whitest of eyes and the reddest of lips — were a favorite subject of these multicolored prints during the rollback of Reconstruction and the birth of Jim Crow segregation in the 1890s.

We can think of the New Negro as Black America’s first superhero, locked in combat against the white-­supremacist fiction of African Americans as “Sambos,” by nature lazy, mentally inferior, licentious and, beneath the surface, lurking sexual predators. The New Negro would undergo several transformations within the race between the mid-1890s and the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, but, in its essence, it was a trope —­ summarized by one writer in 1928 as a continuously evolving “mythological figure” — that would be drawn upon and revised over three decades by black leaders in the country’s first social-media war: the New Negro vs. Sambo.

The concept would prove to be quite volatile. Supposedly New Negroes could be supplanted by even “newer” Negroes. For example, Booker T. Washington, the conservative, accommodationist educator, would be hailed as the first New Negro in 1895, only to be dethroned exactly a decade later on the cover of the Voice of the Negro magazine by his nemesis, W.E.B. Du Bois, the Harvard-trained historian. Du Bois had globalized his version of the New Negro in a landmark photography exhibition at the 1900 Paris Exposition and then, three years later, in his monumental work, The Souls of Black Folk , mounted a ­devastating ­attack on Washington’s philosophy of race relations as dangerously complicitous with Jim Crow segregation and, especially, black male disenfranchisement. Du Bois, a founder of the militant Niagara Movement in 1905, would co-found the NAACP in 1909. And while Douglass had already seen the potential of photography to present an authentic face of black America, and thus to counteract the onslaught of negative stereotypes pervading American society, the children of Reconstruction were the ones who picked up the torch after his death in 1895.

This new generation experimented with a range of artistic mediums to carve out a space for a New Negro who would lead the race — and the country — into the rising century, one whose racial attitudes would be more modern and cosmopolitan than those of the previous century, marred by slavery and Civil War. When D.W. Griffith released his racist Lost Cause fantasy film The Birth of a Nation in 1915, New Negro activists responded not only with protest but also with support for African American artists like the pioneering independent producer and director Oscar Micheaux, whose reels of silent films exposed the horrors of white supremacy while advancing a fuller, more humanistic take on black life.

Their pushback against Redemption took many forms. Denied the ballot box, African American women and men organized­ political associations, churches, schools and social clubs, both to nurture their own culture and to speak out as forcefully as they could against the suffocating oppression unfolding around them. Though brutalized by the shockingly extensive practices of lynching and rape, reinforced by terrorism and vigilante violence, they exposed the crimes and hypocrisy of white supremacy in their own newspapers and magazines, and in marches and political rallies. But no weapon was drawn upon more frequently than images of the New Negro and what the historian Evelyn Higginbotham calls “the politics of respectability.”

Assaulted by the degrading, mass-­produced imagery of the Lost Cause, its romanticization of the Old South and stereotypes of “Sambo” and the “Old Negro,” they avidly counterpunched with their own images of modern women and men, which they widely disseminated in ­journalism, photography, literature and the arts. Drawing on the tradition of agitation epitomized by the black Reconstruction Congressmen, such as John Mercer Langston, and former abolitionists, such as the inimitable Douglass, the children of Reconstruction would lay the foundation for the civil rights revolution to come in the 20th century.

But what also seems clear to me today is that it was in that period that white-­supremacist ideology, especially as it was transmuted into powerful new forms of media, poisoned the American imagination in ways that have long outlasted its origin. You might say that anti-black racism once helped fuel an economic system, and that black crude was pumped and freighted around the world. Now, more than a century and a half since the end of slavery in the U.S., it drifts like a toxic oil slick as the supertanker lists into the sea.

When Dylann Roof murdered the Reverend Clementa Pinckney and the eight other innocents in Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C. , on June 17, 2015, he didn’t need to have read any of this history; it had, unfortunately, long become part of our country’s cultural DNA and, it seems, imprinted on his own. It is important that we both celebrate the triumphs of African Americans following the Civil War and explain how the forces of white supremacy did their best to undermine those triumphs­—then and in all the years since, through to the present.

Gates is the Alphonse Fletcher university professor and director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. His PBS series on Reconstruction airs April 9 and April 16. This essay is adapted from his new book, Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow . Published by Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC . Copyright © 2019 by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

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Slavery, American Civil War, and Reconstruction Essay

The indian removal from the southeast in the late 19th century.

Indian removal from the Southeast in the late 19 th century was as a result of the rapid expansion of the United States into the south. The white settlers considered it an obstacle to development, the settlements made by the Indians in the lower south. It resulted in the removal of the Indian nation to pave way for land that could be used to grow cotton. The U.S military under the command of Andrew Jackson recovered over twenty acres of land from the Creeks in the southern part of Georgia. Treaties were successfully negotiated between the government and the Indians by agreeing to take western lands in exchange for their eastern lands (Jahoda, 1975).

The year 1823 saw the Supreme Court passing a rule that gave the Indians the right to occupy lands within the USA but not issued with the title deeds. This was because of the court ruling that the Indian’s right of occupancy was not fully legalized by the United States government.

Their settlements were inferior to the USA government’s right to discovery. The Indians reacted to this by drafting policies that restricted the sale of what they considered their land to the government. The year 1827 saw the Indians adopt their constitution and declared their land a sovereign nation in an attempt to redeem their stolen lands. These actions were not fully recognized by the state of Georgia, who still regarded Indians as tenants on the United States land (Jahoda, 1975).

The Indian removal act was pushed by Jackson in 1830 which gave him the power to hold negotiation meetings with the Indian tribes. These meetings were meant to remove the treaties that had been signed earlier between the government and the Indian tribe that negotiated the exchange of land from east to west. The removal act affected most of the Indians in the Southeastern and the North. The act championed peaceful removal through voluntary actions. It met resistance from those in the Southeast, which forced the President to apply some forceful means of eviction. This removal was meant to resettle the Indians in an area where they would find peace in governing themselves (Jahoda, 1975).

Plantation life for the slaves

Slavery was believed to have resulted from issues like racism and cultural roots. Several debates tried to explain the effects of slavery on the culture of the victims and the United States as a nation. Slavery was accompanied by some very brutal acts that focused on violence, forced labor, racial discrimination amongst other facts. All the slaves were considered to possess lots of productivity towards work the majority worked as field hands, most of which were male. Women were preferred as house servants while, men were preferred as artisans and slave drivers (Horton & Horton, 2005).

They worked throughout the day and rested only at night hours and specified days. They created some form of community and practiced their cultures within the quarters that they formed. The slaves were granted limited autonomy that affected the normal running and preservation of their families. The wife-husband relationship was not legalized within the plantations. The traditional role of the couples being either the provider or the protector was not easy to fulfill even though the fathers tried their level best to grant the necessary affection to their families.

Christianity brought a sense of meaning to the slaves within the plantation quarters, religion acted as a source of refuge to many. It saw the promotion of Christianity by the planters within the quarters since they considered the tremendous contribution that Christianity had on the level of slave obedience to their masters. There was the creation of African American Christianity, which was meant to purely serve the needs of the slaves and not their masters.

The political and economic issues that led to the civil war and the “Crisis of Union”

The compromised convictions that led to the signing of treaties made America be built based on pretense and tolerance. These pretense ties coupled with political ambitions broke loose in the 1850s; sharp division arose between the Northerners and the Southerners. The Northerners supported the acts of industrial development, the tariffs, and possession of free land from the west. It was contrary to Southerners, who were much concerned about human rights, the setting of free trade zones, and the abolition of slavery. It led to the start of the blame game and ultimately war (Linden, 1994).

Many leaders proposed for the diversion of compromises since it was the major catalyst for the violence that broke out. No party was willing to step down its demands for consensus; maintenance of unity over regional interests was no longer an issue of concern. The origin of the crisis could be traced back to the compromised deals that had been made earlier. There was a bone of contention between those supporting right to property ownership and those demanding individual rights.

Lots of queries were raised over the compromise that was made in 1850 that established the issue on states and expanded slavery beyond the country’s borders. The battle over Kansas presented a major core of the conflict this brought conflict within political parties and executive arms of government. It brought about several elections in search of a good President; this led to further destabilization of the union because of the constant exchange of blows (Linden, 1994).

The Civil War

The United States was forced to adopt policies that focused on military emancipation within all opposing states. This led to the preservation of the constitution and unity based on power-sharing between the state government and the national and the Radicals stand on the issue of equality based on human rights. It also saw the commencement of reforms and the revision of the constitution. Secession presented continuity of process that had begun earlier on with the emergence of different reception from both parties (Owen, 1998).

The government, through the war, managed to extend the nation’s founding principles through the creation of national democracy that recognizes racial integration based on moral principles of the law. Democracy practiced by Jackson led to a split of Americans along social lines, religion, and race. These included the disparity between the rich and the poor, protestant and Catholics, and the Northerners against the westerners. The preservation of American integrity and culture was considered as the greatest progress towards destiny. Therefore, the emergence of secession was a very serious act of offense towards American dignity and survival.

Women played a very big role during the civil war by providing medical relief services within the field and the military camps. They were more involved in activities such as providing food, washing clothes of those who were on the battlefield, and also acted as seamstresses. They were the majority that formed part of the relief workers they worked for salaries to enable them to sustain and provide for their families in the absence of their husbands (Owen, 1998).

The political approaches of the Freedmen, the Radicals in Congress, and the Southern Democrats about Reconstruction following the Civil War

The Freedmen drafted the black codes, which gave them more rights compared to free blacks despite having limited access to civil rights. The black codes provided for limitations on the ability of blacks to have full control over employment.

These codes were ultimately abolished with the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1866 that granted the Freedmen freedom to equality. The Freedmen championed for the rejection of the tough labor laws that were used as a means of oppression on slaves and gave strong support for planters in the process of bargaining for their rights. It led to the adoption of systems that granted greater economic independence and social liberty (Foner, 2002).

The southern democrats comprised of white southerners who surrendered power to Republicans. They stood opposed to the sufferings of the Negroes for economic reasons rather than racial reasons. They fought for economic liberty amongst the planters and the common farmers and also leveraging of taxes for the benefit of common American citizens. It led to the domination of blacks by Democrats to political offices.

On the other hand, the radical Republicans pursued policies that were focused on protecting the southern blacks based on both human ethics and political ambitions. The Radicals were the key supporters of the abolition of black slavery. They pushed for the creation of black civil rights that formed one of the cornerstones of reconstruction. These amendments led to the abolishment of slavery paving way for civil rights, which guaranteed equality under American law. Adoption of the constitution as the country’s fundamental law led to restructuring people’s thoughts towards reconstruction (Foner, 1990).

Horton, J. & Horton, L. (2005). Slavery and the making of America . New York: Oxford University Press.

Foner, E. (1990). A Short History of Reconstruction . New York: Harper Perennial.

Foner, E. (2002). Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics.

Jahoda, G. (1975). The Trail of Tears: The Story of the American Indian Removals 1813-1855 . New York: McGraw Hill.

Linden, G. (1994). Voices from the House Divided: The American Civil War as Personal Experience . New York: McGraw Hill Cos.

Owen, C. J. (1998). The American Journey, A History of the United States . Upper Saddle, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

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Essay on The Civil War and Reconstruction

The Civil War was the turning point in the US history, while the Reconstruction era has completed the achievements of the Civil War and changes launched by the war. At the same time, the outcomes of the Civil War and Reconstruction were disappointing to a large part of the US population, especially slave, whose liberation was one of the major drivers of the Civil War, but the Reconstruction granted them with basic rights and liberties. However, the position of African Americans did not change much. Nevertheless, the Civil War and Reconstruction have laid the foundation to the further development of the US as one nation but, at the same time, the Civil War and Reconstruction have laid the foundation to the further controversies between different social groups in the US society, such as the social tension between different racial groups.

Causes of the Civil War

The major cause of the Civil was slavery and attempts of its abolition triggered Southern states to protect their economic interests and traditional social order based on the exploitation of slaves. The slave labor comprised the core of Southern economy since slaves were employed on cotton plantations and other fields which allowed Southern states to boost their export of cotton mainly. In such a situation, the abolition of slavery would undermine the Southern economy

Furthermore, the growing disparity between industrialized North and Agricultural South misbalanced the power of Northern and Southern states. Slavery prevented South from radical changes and rapid industrialization, while the North needed resources available on the South and wanted to export capital to continue the industrialization of the nation.

Political struggle between abolitionist and proponents of slavery at the top political level laid the political ground for the Civil War. In this regard, attempts of Southern states to preserve larger rights and liberties that provided them with the larger autonomy and sovereignty confronted the growing pressure from the part of the federal government that attempted to take broader control over states.

Lincoln’s election as the President of the US triggered the secession of Southern states, who opposed to his policy of the abolition of slavery in the US. Southern states were unwilling to remain in the union with states opposing slavery, while the election of the President A. Lincoln meant the high probability of the abolition of slavery and Lincoln had started this policy since the beginning of his Presidency, as he took the office.

In response to the election of Lincoln, Southern states declared the secession from the US. Hence, the attempts of the North to regain the unity of the nation resulted in the outbreak of active military actions in the course of the Civil War (Epperson 192). The major developments of the Civil War included the Naval war which resulted in the blockade of Southern states but the superior navy of Northern states.

As the major ports were blocked, Southern states had grown exhausted and running out of resources essential for the maintenance of the struggle against the union forces. At this point, it is worth mentioning the fact that the North attempted to undermine the situation in Southern states, declaring the abolition of slavery and freeing all slaves, as the Northern army advanced southward (Norton 159). In such a way, they gained the support of slaves, who were eager to set themselves free. The Emancipation Proclamation issued by Lincoln in 1863 guaranteed the liberation of all slaves in rebellious states.

In addition, the Northern army recruited African Americans, who joined Northerners in their struggle against Southern states. Eventually, the South had proved to be unable to restrain the assaults of the North and the war ended up in 1865 after four consecutive years of struggle and battles (Watson 125). At this point, it is important to place emphasis on the fact that slavery and policies conducted by the North in relation to slavery had had a considerable impact on the development and outcome of the war. The attempts to abolish slavery triggered the outbreak of the Civil War. During the War, Northern states undermined the economic situation in the South encouraging slaves to rebel against their masters in the South and join the Northern army which they perceived as the liberation army. In such a way, Northern states destabilized the situation in Southern states, undermined their economy and used slaves and their liberation as an important part of their strategy that led them to the overall success in the war. In such a situation, they used their technological superiority and naval blockade to complete the defeat of the South and finally declared the official abolition of slavery nationwide as the result of the war to show that the war had reached its major goal that actually became the primary cause of the war.

Outcomes of the Civil War and Reconstruction

Furthermore, by the end of the war, the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution was implemented and granted slaves with freedom making the Emancipation Proclamation norms universal and permanent. In such a way, the Thirteenth Amendment brought freedom to slaves nationwide and formally abolished slavery in the US.

At first glance, the major goal of the Civil War was achieved but the abolition of slavery alone was not enough to integrate former slaves into the US society and make them a part of the nation. Instead, further legislative changes were needed since slaves should have equal rights and opportunities to exercise their freedom (Watson 175). Otherwise, they would have changed nothing but their formal status to freemen.

In response to the urgent need of changing the legal and socioeconomic status of former slaves, the US Congress implemented the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the US Constitution in 1868 and 1870 respectively (Epperson 188). These amendments formally guaranteed African Americans with equal rights and liberties compared to white Americans and eliminated the existing semi-slavery which persisted shortly after the Civil War, when slaves were freed but had not got equal rights and liberties and their legal status was uncertain.

At the same time, the Reconstruction had failed to bring the consistent improvement to the socioeconomic status of former slaves. African Americans had equal rights and liberties just like other citizens of the US but they did not have economic opportunities to enhance their position in the society. For instance, they did not have opportunities to find a good employment and high wages because they were low-qualified labor force but the main problem was their desperate poverty, which forced them to agree to work for next to nothing simply to survive (Norton 182). In such a situation, they turned out to be in a desperate position and held the lowest socioeconomic standing in the US society.

Nevertheless, the liberation of African Americans still resulted in the tightening competition in the labor market, especially in the South which suffered from considerable economic losses. In fact, the Civil War had disastrous effects which had affected the development of Southern states of the US for a long time (Epperson 211). The export of cotton was almost ruined by the end of the war. The liberation of slaves undermined the economy of South because landowners could not exploit the free labor force. Instead, they had to hire freedmen or poor whites. In such a situation, Southern states needed a lot of time to recover.

However, the poor economic situation in the South caused the social unrest, racial discrimination and oppression of African Americans, whom white Americans kept treating in the South as mere commodities. In such a situation, the whites opposed to the liberation of slaves. To ensure the protection of rights and liberties of African Americans and defeat any attempts of reviving Confederate mood in the South, Lincoln introduced Freedmen’s Bureau in 1865 which was the government agency aiming at the protection of rights of African Americans. The Freedmen Bureau helped African Americans to get freedom and find employment and urged former slave owners to liberate their slaves and rebuilding their plantations to create jobs for African Americans.

However, the post-war resistance of Southern states was so strong that the government had to deploy the army to make land and slave owners to liberate slaves and protect their basic rights and liberties. In such a way, the government attempted to protect African Americans and helped them to improve their position in the society but these efforts were insufficient and short-running. More important, in response to such protectionist government policies, white Southerners launched their organization which aimed at the maintenance of the white supremacy and ongoing oppression of African Americans as second-class citizens. For instance, Ku Klux Klan emerged during the Reconstruction and cases of lynching of African Americans in Southern states of the US were quire frequent that justified the deployment of the army to protect African Americans shortly after the Civil War.

 At the same time, the abolition of slavery, the liberation of slaves and their integration into the US society were not the only goals of the government policy during the Reconstruction. In fact, one of the main goals of the government was to regain control over all states and preserve the US as one nation, as a united country. In such a situation, even the deployment of the army in Southern states during the Reconstruction had dubious goals (Richardson 164). Along with the protection of African American population, the army maintained the authority of the federal government and minimized any risk of the attempt of the new rebel which could outbreak easily, if there were no government troops that could oppress any rebellion fast.

Moreover, the focus of the federal government on needs of African Americans and their integration into the US society was short run. In fact, as soon as the federal government had managed to take control over all states and establish socioeconomic and political stability, the government had started to complete the Reconstruction and refuse from any additional policies, government agencies and other strategies that required additional resources to protect rights and liberties of African Americans and their socioeconomic position in the US society (Norton 188). In fact, by the end of the Reconstruction, millions of African Americans were left on their own with their economic and social problems, stumbling through their life in desperate poverty and their position in the US society had not changed much since the Civil War.

Thus, the Civil War and Reconstruction contributed to consistent changes in the US society among which the abolition of slavery was the main change that took place in the US in that time. However, the abolition of slavery, as the primary goal of the Civil War, brought African Americans freedom but not equal rights, liberties and opportunities. In fact, their rights and liberties were expanded as they got equal rights and liberties after the implementation of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the US Constitution (Watson 215). However, efforts of the federal government to provide African Americans with jobs and better life, they still remained in a disadvantageous position by the end of the Reconstruction, as the Freedmen’s Bureau folded up its operations and the federal government distanced from the support of African Americans. At the same time, the American Civil War and Reconstruction had achieved successfully another goal, which was not declared openly. The war and Reconstruction completed the profound economic change abolition the outdated mode of production, slavery, and expanding opportunities for the rapid industrialization of the entire nation, from the North to South. In addition, the war and Reconstruction had enhanced the role of the federal government, its authority and decreased the sovereignty of people and autonomy of states.

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Civil War And Reconstruction

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• Topic: Abraham Lincoln , Civil War , Reconstruction Era of The United States

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