The problem
When the war ended in 1865, four million people had been freed, the Southern economy lay in ruins, and the nation had to decide on what terms the Confederate states would rejoin the Union and what freedom would mean. The period from 1865 to 1877 is called Reconstruction.
Presidential and Congressional plans
Lincoln favoured a mild plan, and after his assassination in April 1865 President Andrew Johnson pardoned many former Confederates and let Southern states set up new governments quickly. Those governments passed Black Codes, laws that restricted the freedom of Black Southerners, forcing many into labour contracts. Many in Congress, especially the Radical Republicans, saw this as undoing the Union's victory. Congress took control of the process and passed the Reconstruction Acts (1867), placing the South under military districts and requiring new state constitutions that protected Black male suffrage.
Amendments and institutions
- 13th Amendment (1865): ended slavery.
- 14th Amendment (1868): defined citizenship for anyone born in the United States and guaranteed "equal protection of the laws".
- 15th Amendment (1870): barred denying the vote on grounds of race.
- The Freedmen's Bureau provided food, schools and help with labour contracts. Black Southerners founded churches, schools and colleges, and about 2,000 held public office, including 16 in Congress.
Johnson was impeached by the House in 1868 over a dispute with Congress, and the Senate fell one vote short of removing him.
The end of Reconstruction
Groups such as the Ku Klux Klan used violence to stop Black voting and Republican rule. Federal enforcement weakened, and Northern voters grew tired of the issue and distracted by an economic depression in 1873. In the disputed election of 1876, Rutherford B. Hayes became president after a deal widely understood to include withdrawing the last federal troops from the South. Over the following decades Southern states imposed Jim Crow segregation and voting restrictions.
Worked example: sharecropping
- Freed families wanted their own land, but most received none.
- Landowners had land but little cash, and needed labour.
- In sharecropping, a family farmed a plot and paid the owner a share of the crop, often half.
- The family bought seed and supplies on credit from a store, at high prices.
- At harvest, debts often equalled or exceeded the family's share, so they stayed in debt and tied to the land.
The system offered more independence than slavery had, but its debt trap limited real economic freedom.