Reconstruction

In US history, the period 1865–77 after the Civil War during which the nation was reunited under the federal government after the defeat of the Southern Confederacy and Union troops were stationed in Southern states.

Much of the industry and infrastructure of the South lay in ruins after the Civil War. President Andrew Johnson devised a plan for Reconstruction that offered pardons to most Southern whites and the opportunity for Southern states to form their own governments, provided that they abolish slavery and pledge loyalty to the Union. Many northerners, especially those moderates called Radical Republicans, however, disagreed with his conciliatory policy. This feud culminated in Johnson's impeachment in 1868 before the Senate, who failed to convict him by one vote.

During Reconstruction, industrial and commercial projects began to restore the economy of the South, and new programmes were developed such as public school systems. These improvements, however, failed to ensure racial equality, and former slaves remained, in most cases, landless labourers, although emancipated slaves were assisted in finding work, shelter, and lost relatives through federal agencies. Reconstruction also resulted in an influx of Northern profiteers known as carpetbaggers. Both the imposition of outside military authority and the equal status conferred on former slaves combined to make Southerners bitterly resentful. As they began to take control of their own state governments they also began to defy the terms of their re-entry into the Union by disenfranchising blacks.

President Abraham Lincoln had been ready to accord the eleven rebel states generous treatment, but he had been opposed by Radicals in Congress. His successor Andrew Johnson, who maintained his policy of reconciliation, issued a formal pardon for the entire South on 29 May 1865. He also secured the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, forbidding slavery in the USA.

However, Congress was not satisfied by these moderate measures and on 4 December 1865 passed a bill for the appointment of a committee to inquire into the question of the Southern states. A further bill was passed in 1866, over Johnson's veto, giving black people full rights as citizens, which was later embodied in the Fourteenth Amendment to the constitution.

Johnson's failure to work with moderate Republicans in guaranteeing basic rights and protection for the freed slaves caused a Radical triumph in the elections of 1866, ushering in a period of ‘Radical Reconstruction’, and opened the way for military reconstruction. The Reconstruction Acts of 1867 began this process, dividing the Southern states (except Tennessee, which had been readmitted to the Union in 1866) into five military districts. Civilian rule and full state rights were to be restored only after the states had adopted constitutions based upon universal male suffrage and ratified the Fourteenth Amendment. By 1868 all but three states were readmitted under these conditions, Mississippi, Texas, and Virginia finally acquiescing in 1870. The Fifteenth Amendment, ratified in March 1870, aimed to guarantee black suffrage in the South. The new state governments in the South were usually Republican and governed by blacks, carpetbaggers, and scalawags (white Southerners who supported the Union during the Civil War).

Despite the legislation, many Southern states still practised discrimination and segregation. Jim Crow laws disenfranchised blacks in every Southern state, making them powerless to prevent these segregation laws and codes. During this time white supremacist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan were founded to oppose Reconstruction and to deny political rights to the black population. The lack of an independent economic base, moreover, meant that blacks were not able to advance significantly in the decades after the war.

Radical Reconstruction was short-lived as one by one the Southern states were ‘redeemed’ by conservative political groups and the Republican Party dwindled below the Mason–Dixon Line, the boundary line between Maryland and Pennsylvania seen as the line dividing the North from the South. Corruption and incompetence had certainly been a part of Radical Reconstruction, but its defeat marked the end of attempts towards giving all citizens social equality. The period of Reconstruction ended with the withdrawal of troops from the South in 1877, during the presidency of Rutherford B Hayes.