Definition
Reconstruction is the period from 1865 to 1877 during which the U.S. federal government attempted to reorganize the defeated Confederate states, abolish slavery, ratify the three Reconstruction Amendments (Thirteenth, Fourteenth, Fifteenth), and integrate four million emancipated people into civic and political life as citizens.
It ended with the Compromise of 1877, by which federal troops were withdrawn from the South in exchange for resolving the disputed 1876 presidential election in favor of Rutherford B. Hayes. The withdrawal cleared the way for the "Redeemer" Democratic state governments that built Jim Crow over the next two decades.
Why it matters
How it works
The period had three sub-eras. Presidential Reconstruction (1865–1867), under Andrew Johnson, was lenient toward former Confederates and largely abandoned the freedmen; Southern states immediately passed Black Codes restricting freedmen's labor and movement, and the Memphis and New Orleans massacres of 1866 made clear the limits of federal protection. Radical Reconstruction (1867–1872) followed Republican landslides in Congress: the Reconstruction Acts divided the South into military districts, required new state constitutions guaranteeing Black male suffrage, and produced the Fourteenth Amendment (citizenship and equal protection) and Fifteenth Amendment (Black male voting rights). For a brief period, biracial Republican coalitions held power across the South; Black men served in every Southern state legislature, in the U.S. House (sixteen during the era), and in the U.S. Senate (Hiram Revels and Blanche K. Bruce). Redemption (1872–1877) was the white Southern counter-revolution: the Ku Klux Klan and successor groups (the White League, the Red Shirts) used assassination, voter intimidation, and outright coup d'état (Wilmington, 1898 — after the formal end) to drive Black voters and white Republicans out of politics, while Northern public opinion lost interest, the Republican Party drifted toward business interests, and the Supreme Court began narrowing the scope of the new amendments.
The economic dimension is as important as the political. The federal government did not redistribute land. General Sherman's Special Field Orders No. 15 of January 1865 — the "forty acres and a mule" promise — was rescinded by Johnson months later; confiscated plantation land was returned to former owners. Freedmen, without land, were forced into labor contracts with their former enslavers, which evolved into sharecropping and debt peonage. The Freedmen's Bureau, the federal agency overseeing the transition, was underfunded, undermanned, and dissolved in 1872. Whatever Reconstruction accomplished politically was undermined economically before it began.
The Compromise of 1877 was less a single deal than a confirmation of an exhaustion that had already set in. Federal troops left the last three Southern states; biracial governments collapsed within months; the "Redeemer" Democratic regimes set about disenfranchising Black voters and segregating public life. By the time of Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, the Supreme Court was ratifying a regime that had been built on the ground over the previous twenty years. The Great Migration that began in 1915 was, in one sense, the demographic accounting of what Reconstruction had not delivered.