reconstruction period essay ideas

Understanding Reconstruction - A Historiography

As the United States entered the 20th century, Reconstruction slowly receded into popular memory. Historians began to debate its results. William Dunning and John W. Burgess led the first group to offer a coherent and structured argument. Along with their students at Columbia University, Dunning, Burgess, and their retinue created a historical school of thought known as the Dunning School. This interpretation of Reconstruction placed it firmly in the category of historical blunder.

Why did the Dunning School blame Radical Republicans and Freedmen for Reconstruction's failure?

While the Radical Republicans were the apparent villains, Dunning and his followers ascribed blame to President Johnson as well, saddling him with responsibility for Reconstruction’s failure. Freedmen were portrayed as animalistic or easily manipulated, therefore, lacking the kind of agency they indeed exhibited. While certainly influenced by the day's racial bias, the Dunning School at least formulated a coherent argument (although an incredibly inaccurate and distasteful one) that refused to fragment. This model of unity did prove somewhat valuable to historians following Dunning, even if their historical research opposed the Dunning School’s argument, “For all their faults, it is ironic that the best Dunning studies did, at least, attempt to synthesize the social, political, and economic aspects of the period.” In contrast, the Progressive historians that followed the Dunning School disagreed with some of its interpretations. President Johnson was not to blame, but rather, the Northern Radical Republicans were at fault. They cynically used freedmen's civil rights as a means to force capitalism and economic dependence on the South.

Why was W.E.B. Du Bois's reassessment of Reconstruction so important?

However, one work stands out from this period as a harbinger of what was to come. W.E.B. Du Bois wrote Black Reconstruction in America in 1935. Du Bois chastised historians for ignoring the central figures of Reconstruction, the freedmen. Moreover, Du Bois pointedly remarked on the prevailing racial bias of the historical inquiry up to that moment, “One fact and one alone explains the attitude of most recent writers toward Reconstruction; they cannot conceive of Negroes as men.” Du Bois’s indictment served as a precursor for the explosion of revisionist history of the 1960s, which would latch onto the argument of Du Bois and refocus the debate concerning Reconstruction to include the central figures of the freedmen.

The revisionists of the 1960s viewed Reconstruction's heroes to be the Southern freedmen and the Radical Republicans. Instead of going too far, Reconstruction failed to be radical enough. According to revisionists, Reconstruction was tragic not because it went too far and handcuffed white southerners; it was tragic because it was unable to securely secure the rights of freedmen and failed to restructure Southern society through land reform and similar measures. Following on the heels of the Revisionist School were the Post-Revisionists who viewed Reconstruction as overly conservative. This conservatism failed to achieve any lasting influence; thus, once Reconstruction ended, the South returned to its old social and economic structures.

What is the Modern Interpretation of Reconstruction?

So, where has that left historians today? How do more recent historians interpret Reconstruction? Several leading historians (James McPherson, Eric Foner, Emory Thomas) have labeled either the Civil War or Reconstruction as a second American revolution. Eric Foner’s work Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution openly claims Reconstruction to be a break from traditional systems (social, political, economic) prevailing in the South.

In contrast, Emory Thomas’s The Confederacy as a Revolutionary Experience argues the South first underwent a “conservative revolution” in breaking away from the Union since it broke from the North not to redefine itself but to maintain the status quo of the South. Ironically, according to Thomas, this first “external” revolution was subsumed by a more radical “internal” revolution during the Civil War as the South attempted to urbanize, industrialize and modernize to compete with the North. Thus, whether consciously or not, the Confederacy's leaders looked to recreate the South in a way that mirrored the North in several ways. However, this brief example illustrates the differences among historians and the current scholarship on the Civil War and Reconstruction. Perhaps, the best place to start might be with conditions between the North and South before the outbreak of war in 1861.

James McPherson provides a convincing account of the growing differences between the North and South on the eve of the war. McPherson, author of Battle Cry for Freedom (considered in some circles as the preeminent account of the Civil War), is frequently acknowledged as a leading if not the leading historian in Civil War studies today. In an essay for Major Problems in the Civil War and Reconstruction entitled, “The Differences between the Antebellum North and South,” McPherson argues that the South had not changed, but the North had. According to McPherson, the Southern states had remained loyal to the Jeffersonian interpretation of republicanism. Instead of investing in manufacturing and industry, they reinvested in agrarian pursuits. Southern culture emphasized traditional values, patronage, and ties of kinship.

Northern republicanism was opposed to the Southern belief in republicanism emphasizing limited government and property rights, not to mention Southern anti-manufacturing sensibilities. Additionally, the more capital intensive economy of the North relied on wage labor and immigration. Two economic and social variables absent from the South. The rise of wage labor placed wager earners in the North in opposition to the system of slavery in the South, and the rising population of the North (from immigration) increased tensions between the two regions. Along with these differences, the West of America was growing rapidly in the image of the North. Resulting from the influence and growth of railroads, trade relations were no longer centered on the North/South relationship but East to West.

Moreover, the political system held a foundation based on the patronage of the planter class. According to Thomas, the South’s initial break from the Union was inspired by the hope that the South might preserve its traditions and institutions. Led by radical “fire-eaters,” Southern politicians incited animosity between the North and South, “They made a ‘conservative revolution’ to preserve the antebellum status quo, but they made a revolution just the same. The ‘fire-eaters’ employed classic revolutionary tactics in their agitation for secession. And the Confederates were no fewer rebels than their grandfathers had been in 1776”.

However, this initial ‘conservative revolution’ inspired by radicals was overtaken by the moderates of the political south who recognized the need for change. If the Confederacy were to survive economically, politically, and socially, they would mount their internal revolution. Peter Kolchin’s work American Slavery 1619-1877 upholds much of McPherson’s and Thomas’ arguments concerning the South’s increasingly entrenched society. Kolchin’s work attempts to synthesize the prevailing studies of the day concerning slavery in America. Divided into three sections (colonial America and the American Revolution, antebellum South, and Civil War and Reconstruction)

Moreover, politically, Kolchin remarks on the non-democratic nature of the South, “antebellum Southern sociopolitical thought harbored profoundly anti-democratic currents … More common than outright attacks on democracy were denunciations of fanatical reformism and appealed to conservatism, order, and tradition.” Also, the access to education among Southerners was limited at best, “Advocates of public education, for example, made little headway in their drive to persuade Southern state legislatures to emulate their northern counterparts and establish statewide public schooling … it was only after the Civil War that public education became widely available in the South.”

How did the Civil War Change the South's Social Structure?

In general, Thomas points out three areas of change political, economic, and social. The economic reform was extreme. As the Civil War commenced, the south had neither a large industrial complex nor many large urban areas (New Orleans stands as the lone exception). Jefferson Davis and others saw the need for increased industry and urbanization, “A nation of farmers knew the frustration of going hungry, but Southern industry made great strides. And Southern cities swelled in size and importance. Cotton, once king, became a pawn in the Confederate South. The emphasis on manufacturing and urbanization came too little, too late. But compared to the antebellum South, the Confederate South underwent nothing short of an economic revolution.”

Thus, once Weaver had assembled some 70 slaves, he no longer looked to improve industrial efficiency or examine technological advancements. “After he acquired and trained a group of skilled slave artisans in the 1820s and 1830s and had his ironworks functioning successfully, Weaver displayed little interest in trying to improve the technology of ironmaking at Buffalo Forge … The emphasis was on stability, not innovation. Slavery, in short, seems to have exerted a profoundly conservative influence on the manufacturing process at Buffalo Forge, and one suspects that similar circumstances prevailed at industrial establishments throughout the slave South.” Thus, Dew’s assertion would render the Confederacy’s attempt to industrialize increasingly tricky since the Southern labor system was not conducive to optimum industrial efficiency. Additionally, the Confederacy’s attempt to industrialize, urbanize, and in general, command the Southern economy contrasts sharply with its belief in states’ rights federal authority. Through such management of the economy, the Confederate leaders were contradicting themselves, yet the war called for such measures.

According to Thomas, such reorganization did not limit itself to the economic field. Southern women were no longer confined to the home, “Southern women climbed down from their pedestals and became refugees, went to work in factories, or assumed the responsibility for managing farms.” This hardly seems to be a radical premise since this cycle repeats itself nationally during both World Wars of the 20th century.

Besides, class consciousness began to form in the minds of the “proletariat” “Under the strain of wartime some “un Southern” rents appeared in the fabric of Southern society. The very process of renting what had been harmonious—mass meetings, riots, resistance to Confederate law and order—was the most visible manifestation of the social unsettlement within the Confederate South. Whether caused by heightened class awareness, disaffection with the “cause,” or frustration with physical privation, domestic tumults bore witness to the social ferment which replaced antebellum stability.” Of course, Thomas is careful to couch this class consciousness with limits, “This is not to imply that the Confederate south seethed with labor unrest; it is rather to say that working men in the Confederacy asserted themselves to a degree unknown in the antebellum period.”

Therefore, would this not serve more aptly as an example of wartime necessities undertaken for war but not intended for permanence? One might respond that such cases begin the process of change since historically, once people are granted rights or freedoms, it proves to be quite difficult to reclaim such rights, mobility, or freedoms. However, one last point concerning social mobility must be made. Considering the conditions of trade for the South during the war, new ways of the trade needed to be located. Such avenues to wealth did provide many southerners previously excluded from the planter class to ascend the ladder of social mobility once new avenues or means to profit were established, “Those who were able to take advantage of new opportunities in trade and industry became wealthy and powerful men … Not only did exemplary men rise from commonplace to prominence in the Confederate period; statistical evidence tends to confirm that the Confederate leadership as a whole came from non-planters.”

Similarly, Thomas argues that the suspension of civil liberties in the South was a radical departure from Southern culture. Suspension of civil liberties is a common wartime tactic (WWI, WWII). Lincoln did the same in the North. Thomas cannot use this as truly viable evidence of revolutionary change.

Was Reconstruction a Revolution?

However, further complicating this portion of Foner’s argument is the non-linear nature of race relations in the South. Rather as Foner illustrates throughout the book, race relations were subject to local variables that greatly influenced interactions. Moreover, advances did not proceed linearly. Instead, through complex social, political, and economic interactions between races, race relations gradually evolved at times progressing, while in other moments, regressing. African American freedmen fought for their freedoms and liberties even when white resistance turned violent and exclusionary. Its this constant push and pull effect that produces the racial structure of the postwar South.

Foner’s work's major strength lies in its attempt to sketch for the reader a process that Foner argues begins in 1863 with Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. In reality, Lincoln’s command held minimal legitimacy since it did not free slaves in the border states. Thus, Lincoln’s lack of authority over the South left his abolition of slavery a mere symbol in the Southern states. Despite this fact, Foner argues that “emancipation meant more than the end of a labor system, more even than the uncompensated liquidation of the nation’s largest concentration of private property … The demise of slavery inevitably threw open the most basic questions of the polity, economy, and society. Begun to preserve the Union, the war now portended a far-reaching transformation in Southern life and a redefinition of the place of blacks in American society and of the very meaning of freedom in the American republic.”

Reconstruction argues similarly, “But in 1867, politics emerged as the principal focus of black aspirations. The meteoric rise of the Union League reflected and channeled this political mobilization. By the end of 1867, it seemed, virtually every black voter in the South had enrolled in the Union League. The league’s main function, however, was political education” However, this political awareness did not mean that all Southerners appreciated it, nor did it necessarily lead to a better understanding between white and black Southerners, “Now as freedmen poured into the league, ‘the negro question’ disrupted some upcountry branches, leading many white members to withdraw altogether or retreat into segregated branches.” Such political activism redrew racial relationships and reorganized institutions. For example, the Union League’s acceptance of freedmen resulted in white flight or segregation among other branches, despite the small white farmer and the freedmen's obvious class similarities. Still, the political activism by freedmen and freedwomen signifies a great change in Southern society.

Harold D. Woodman also notes similar manifestations. However, it must be noted; Woodman refuses to use the term “revolutionary” for the Civil War and Reconstruction period. According to Woodman, historians must assess the quality of this change, not the amount. Woodman notes the need for reform in the former slave society. However, the reform needed was never produced. Bourgeoisie free labor was the basis of the new southern economy since the Emancipation Proclamation and the Civil War had destroyed the previous one. New roles for both slave and the planter arose, along with the need for new lines of authority.

Why was Reconstruction was a Failure?

So, how successful was Reconstruction? Foner argues that Reconstruction proved revolutionary for a period but ultimately failed. “Here, however, we enter the realm of the purely speculative. What remains certain is that Reconstruction failed and that for blacks, its failure was a disaster whose magnitude cannot be obscured by the genuine accomplishments that did endure. For the nation as a whole, the collapse of Reconstruction was a tragedy that deeply affected the course of its future development.” Thomas views the final results of Reconstruction similarly but through a slightly different historical lens. According to Thomas, Reconstruction undid the revolutionary advances of the Confederacy, “Ironically, the internal revolution went to completion at the very time that the external revolution collapsed … The program of the radical Republicans may have failed to restructure Southern society. It may, in the end, have “sold out” the freedmen in the South. Reconstruction did succeed in frustrating the positive elements of the revolutionary Southern experience.”

Thus, Reconstruction allowed African Americans to more fully express agency while still oppressed. It gave blacks the chance to counter such oppression more freely. Networks, communities, and relationships were all redefined and recreated. Again, just as Foner maintained, Kolchin remarks, “And in the years after World War II, again with the help of white allies, they spearheaded a “second Reconstruction” – grounded on the legal foundation provided by the first — to create an interracial society that would finally overcome the persistent legacy of slavery.”

This article was originally published on Videri.org and is republished here with their permission.

Updated December 8, 2020

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Origins of Reconstruction

Presidential reconstruction, radical reconstruction.

• The end of Reconstruction

What was the Reconstruction era?

What were the reconstruction era promises, was the reconstruction era a success or a failure.

• Who was W.E.B. Du Bois?
• What did W.E.B. Du Bois write?

Reconstruction

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• American Battlefield Trust - Reconstruction: An Overview
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• New Jersey State Library - The Reconstruction Era, 1865-1877
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The Reconstruction era was the period after the American Civil War from 1865 to 1877, during which the United States grappled with the challenges of reintegrating into the Union the states that had seceded and determining the legal status of African Americans . Presidential Reconstruction, from 1865 to 1867, required little of the former Confederate states and leaders. Radical Reconstruction attempted to give African Americans full equality.

Why was the Reconstruction era important?

The Reconstruction era redefined U.S. citizenship and expanded the franchise, changed the relationship between the federal government and the governments of the states, and highlighted the differences between political and economic democracy.

While U.S. Pres. Andrew Johnson attempted to return the Southern states to essentially the condition they were in before the American Civil War , Republicans in Congress passed laws and amendments that affirmed the “equality of all men before the law” and prohibited racial discrimination, that made African Americans full U.S. citizens, and that forbade laws to prevent African Americans from voting.

During a brief period in the Reconstruction era, African Americans voted in large numbers and held public office at almost every level, including in both houses of Congress . However, this provoked a violent backlash from whites who did not want to relinquish supremacy. The backlash succeeded, and the promises of Reconstruction were mostly unfulfilled. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments were unenforced but remained on the books, forming the basis of the mid-20th-century civil rights movement .

Reconstruction , in U.S. history, the period (1865–77) that followed the American Civil War and during which attempts were made to redress the inequities of slavery and its political, social, and economic legacy and to solve the problems arising from the readmission to the Union of the 11 states that had seceded at or before the outbreak of war. Long portrayed by many historians as a time when vindictive Radical Republicans fastened Black supremacy upon the defeated Confederacy , Reconstruction has since the late 20th century been viewed more sympathetically as a laudable experiment in interracial democracy . Reconstruction witnessed far-reaching changes in America’s political life. At the national level, new laws and constitutional amendments permanently altered the federal system and the definition of American citizenship. In the South , a politically mobilized Black community joined with white allies to bring the Republican Party to power, and with it a redefinition of the responsibilities of government.

The national debate over Reconstruction began during the Civil War. In December 1863, less than a year after he issued the Emancipation Proclamation , Pres. Abraham Lincoln announced the first comprehensive program for Reconstruction, the Ten Percent Plan. Under it, when one-tenth of a state’s prewar voters took an oath of loyalty, they could establish a new state government. To Lincoln, the plan was an attempt to weaken the Confederacy rather than a blueprint for the postwar South. It was put into operation in parts of the Union-occupied Confederacy, but none of the new governments achieved broad local support. In 1864 Congress enacted (and Lincoln pocket vetoed) the Wade-Davis Bill , which proposed to delay the formation of new Southern governments until a majority of voters had taken a loyalty oath. Some Republicans were already convinced that equal rights for the former slaves had to accompany the South’s readmission to the Union. In his last speech, on April 11, 1865, Lincoln, referring to Reconstruction in Louisiana , expressed the view that some Blacks—the “very intelligent” and those who had served in the Union army—ought to enjoy the right to vote .

Following Lincoln’s assassination in April 1865, Andrew Johnson became president and inaugurated the period of Presidential Reconstruction (1865–67). Johnson offered a pardon to all Southern whites except Confederate leaders and wealthy planters (although most of these subsequently received individual pardons), restoring their political rights and all property except slaves. He also outlined how new state governments would be created. Apart from the requirement that they abolish slavery, repudiate secession, and abrogate the Confederate debt, these governments were granted a free hand in managing their affairs. They responded by enacting the Black codes , laws that required African Americans to sign yearly labour contracts and in other ways sought to limit the freedmen’s economic options and reestablish plantation discipline . African Americans strongly resisted the implementation of these measures, and they seriously undermined Northern support for Johnson’s policies.

When Congress assembled in December 1865, Radical Republicans such as Rep. Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania and Sen. Charles Sumner from Massachusetts called for the establishment of new Southern governments based on equality before the law and universal male suffrage. But the more numerous moderate Republicans hoped to work with Johnson while modifying his program. Congress refused to seat the representatives and senators elected from the Southern states and in early 1866 passed the Freedmen’s Bureau and Civil Rights Bills. The first extended the life of an agency Congress had created in 1865 to oversee the transition from slavery to freedom. The second defined all persons born in the United States as national citizens, who were to enjoy equality before the law.

A combination of personal stubbornness, fervent belief in states’ rights , and racist convictions led Johnson to reject these bills, causing a permanent rupture between himself and Congress. The Civil Rights Act became the first significant legislation in American history to become law over a president’s veto. Shortly thereafter, Congress approved the Fourteenth Amendment , which put the principle of birthright citizenship into the Constitution and forbade states to deprive any citizen of the “equal protection” of the laws. Arguably the most important addition to the Constitution other than the Bill of Rights , the amendment constituted a profound change in federal-state relations. Traditionally, citizens’ rights had been delineated and protected by the states. Thereafter, the federal government would guarantee all Americans’ equality before the law against state violation.

In the fall 1866 congressional elections, Northern voters overwhelmingly repudiated Johnson’s policies. Congress decided to begin Reconstruction anew. The Reconstruction Acts of 1867 divided the South into five military districts and outlined how new governments, based on manhood suffrage without regard to race , were to be established. Thus began the period of Radical or Congressional Reconstruction, which lasted until the end of the last Southern Republican governments in 1877.

By 1870 all the former Confederate states had been readmitted to the Union, and nearly all were controlled by the Republican Party. Three groups made up Southern Republicanism. Carpetbaggers , or recent arrivals from the North, were former Union soldiers, teachers, Freedmen’s Bureau agents, and businessmen. The second large group, scalawags , or native-born white Republicans, included some businessmen and planters, but most were nonslaveholding small farmers from the Southern up-country. Loyal to the Union during the Civil War, they saw the Republican Party as a means of keeping Confederates from regaining power in the South.

In every state, African Americans formed the overwhelming majority of Southern Republican voters. From the beginning of Reconstruction, Black conventions and newspapers throughout the South had called for the extension of full civil and political rights to African Americans. Composed of those who had been free before the Civil War plus slave ministers, artisans , and Civil War veterans, the Black political leadership pressed for the elimination of the racial caste system and the economic uplifting of the former slaves. Sixteen African Americans served in Congress during Reconstruction—including Hiram Revels and Blanche K. Bruce in the U.S. Senate—more than 600 in state legislatures, and hundreds more in local offices from sheriff to justice of the peace scattered across the South. So-called “Black supremacy” never existed, but the advent of African Americans in positions of political power marked a dramatic break with the country’s traditions and aroused bitter hostility from Reconstruction’s opponents.

Serving an expanded citizenry, Reconstruction governments established the South’s first state-funded public school systems, sought to strengthen the bargaining power of plantation labourers, made taxation more equitable, and outlawed racial discrimination in public transportation and accommodations. They also offered lavish aid to railroads and other enterprises in the hope of creating a “New South” whose economic expansion would benefit Blacks and whites alike. But the economic program spawned corruption and rising taxes, alienating increasing numbers of white voters.

Meanwhile, the social and economic transformation of the South proceeded apace. To Blacks, freedom meant independence from white control. Reconstruction provided the opportunity for African Americans to solidify their family ties and to create independent religious institutions, which became centres of community life that survived long after Reconstruction ended. The former slaves also demanded economic independence. Blacks’ hopes that the federal government would provide them with land had been raised by Gen. William T. Sherman ’s Field Order No. 15 of January 1865, which set aside a large swath of land along the coast of South Carolina and Georgia for the exclusive settlement of Black families, and by the Freedmen’s Bureau Act of March, which authorized the bureau to rent or sell land in its possession to former slaves. But President Johnson in the summer of 1865 ordered land in federal hands to be returned to its former owners. The dream of “ 40 acres and a mule” was stillborn. Lacking land, most former slaves had little economic alternative other than resuming work on plantations owned by whites. Some worked for wages, others as sharecroppers, who divided the crop with the owner at the end of the year. Neither status offered much hope for economic mobility. For decades, most Southern Blacks remained propertyless and poor.

Nonetheless, the political revolution of Reconstruction spawned increasingly violent opposition from white Southerners. White supremacist organizations that committed terrorist acts, such as the Ku Klux Klan , targeted local Republican leaders for beatings or assassination. African Americans who asserted their rights in dealings with white employers, teachers, ministers, and others seeking to assist the former slaves also became targets. At Colfax, Louisiana, in 1873, scores of Black militiamen were killed after surrendering to armed whites intent on seizing control of local government. Increasingly, the new Southern governments looked to Washington, D.C. , for assistance.

By 1869 the Republican Party was firmly in control of all three branches of the federal government. After attempting to remove Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton , in violation of the new Tenure of Office Act , Johnson had been impeached by the House of Representatives in 1868. Although the Senate, by a single vote, failed to remove him from office, Johnson’s power to obstruct the course of Reconstruction was gone. Republican Ulysses S. Grant was elected president that fall ( see United States presidential election of 1868 ). Soon afterward, Congress approved the Fifteenth Amendment , prohibiting states from restricting the right to vote because of race. Then it enacted a series of Enforcement Acts authorizing national action to suppress political violence. In 1871 the administration launched a legal and military offensive that destroyed the Klan. Grant was reelected in 1872 in the most peaceful election of the period.

W. Fitzhugh Brundage
William B. Umstead Professor of History, University of North Carolina
National Humanities Center Fellow
©National Humanities Center

The Reconstruction era is always a challenge to teach. First, it was a period of tremendous political complexity and far-reaching consequences. A cursory survey of Reconstruction is never satisfying, but a fuller treatment of Reconstruction can be like quick sand—easy to get into but impossible to get out of. Second, to the extent that students may have any preconceptions about Reconstruction, The Big Questions of Reconstruction they are often an obstacle to a deeper understanding of the period. Given these challenges, I have gradually settled on an approach to the period that avoids much of the complex chronology of the era and instead focuses on the “big questions” of Reconstruction.

However important a command of the chronology of Reconstruction may be, it is equally important that students understand that Reconstruction was a period when American waged a sustained debate over who was an American, what rights should all Americans enjoy, and what rights would only some Americans possess. In short, Americans engaged in a strenuous debate about the nature of freedom and equality.

With the surrender of Confederate armies and the capture of Jefferson Davis in the spring of 1865, pressing questions demanded immediate answers. On what terms would the nation be reunited? What was the status of the former Confederate states? How would citizenship be defined in the postwar nation? Were the former slaves American citizens now? When and how would former Confederates regain their American citizenship? What form of labor would replace slavery?

White Americans did not expect blacks to participate in Reconstruction-era debates. Blacks thought otherwise. The nation’s approximately four million African Americans, of whom roughly 3.5 million were at the center of each of these questions. If white northerners had only gradually come to understand that the Civil War was a war to end slavery, they recognized immediately during the postwar era that the place of blacks in American society was inextricably bound up in all these pressing questions of the day. Even so, white northerners, and more so white southerners, presumed that they would debate and resolve these questions with little or no consideration of black opinion. Nothing in the previous history of race relations in North America prepared white Americans for the conspicuous role that African Americans played in the events after the Civil War. By the end of Reconstruction, no Americans could doubt that African Americans were intent on claiming their rights as citizens or participating in the debate about their future.

Black citizenship depended on the status of the Confederate states. That African Americans became American citizens was arguably the signal development during Reconstruction. Only a decade earlier the Supreme Court had ruled in the decision in 1858 that people of African descent imported into the United States and held as slaves, or their descendants—whether or not they were slaves—could never be citizens of the United States. When, during the Civil War, slaves began to flee to Union lines in growing numbers and after the , it became clear that “facts on the ground” would overtake the decision. However, any resolution of the status of former slaves had to be resolved within the context of American federalism, because until that time citizenship was defined and protected by state law. Therefore, the resolution of the citizenship status of blacks was contingent on the status of the former Confederate states and their relationship with the nation at large.

After the Civil War, were the Confederate states conquered lands, frontier territories, or states in good standing? Who exercised the power to define the rights of former slaves would depend upon who held the power to dictate what happened in the former Confederacy. Were the former Confederate states conquered territory? If so, then the federal government (or, in other words, northern whites and Republicans) could dictate the reconstruction of the South. Or were the former Confederate states essentially quasi-frontier territories that had to be readmitted to the union? If so, then the voters of the South would decide the course of the former Confederacy. In addition, those same voters would decide the content of citizenship in their states. Or were the former Confederate states still states in good standing that would return to their former, pre-war status as soon as southerners elected congressmen, senators, governors? If that were the case, then presumably the southern states, and the definition of citizenship that prevailed in them before the Civil War, would be restored.

Northern opinion on this question varied widely. Abraham Lincoln, before his murder, had recommended the speedy return of the southern states. Lincoln presumed that the reunion of the nation was of paramount importance. Andrew Johnson, who assumed the presidency after Lincoln’s assassination, adopted the same view of reunion, proposing to restore political rights to white southerners as soon as they pledged loyalty to the union. While willing to grant presidential pardons to even high-ranking Confederate officers and politicians, Johnson displayed no interest in extending citizenship to former slaves. Other northerners looked askance at Johnson’s decision to restore political power to white southerners, especially after their behavior suggested little contrition on their part. In the fall of 1865, white southerners who had regained their political rights under Johnson’s policies elected many former Confederates leaders and generals, including even the Vice President of the Confederacy, to represent their states in Congress. Northerners who had just fought against secession for four years and who had buried hundreds of thousands of wartime casualties refused to tolerate the seating of Confederates in Congress less than a year after the guns fell silent.

The issue of African American citizenship provoked equally complex competing views. White southerners had clear ideas about the social and racial order that would replace slavery; . During the fall of 1865 southern state legislatures that had been organized under Johnson’s Reconstruction plan adopted oppressive laws, known as the “Black Codes,” that narrowly defined the civil rights and social and economic status of the freed people. The Codes explicitly denied blacks the right to vote, limited their freedom of movement, and criminalized behavior.

White southerners overplayed their hand. The combination of the harsh Black Codes and the prevalence of Confederates in southern delegations to Congress in the fall of 1865 hastened the beginning of what became known as Congressional Reconstruction. Essentially, Congress, controlled by a Republican majority, used its legislative powers and control over the federal purse strings in an attempt to impose answers to the “Big Questions of Reconstruction” listed above.

The recalcitrance of white Southerners opened Republicans to extending full citizenship to the formerly enslaved. Congressional Reconstruction thus may be understood as an attempt to prevent white southerners from dictating the outcome of Reconstruction. The only consensus that existed among northern politicians during Reconstruction was that white southerners should not have a free hand, as they had in late 1865 and early 1866, to impose their will on the South. From , John Richard Dennett
Raleigh, N.C., October 5, 1865

The session [of "the colored men's convention"] was held in the African Methodist church, a small edifice in a back street of the city. The delegates were about a hundred and twenty in number, but crowds of colored citizens were interested spectators through the four days, and the house was always filled full. . . . [T]hese men though ignorant were intelligent, and often spoke exceedingly well. "Yes," said one of the cleverest among them—"yes, we are ignorant. . . . They say we don't know what the word constitution means. But if we don't know enough to know what the Constitution is, we know enough to know what justice is."

White northerners gradually understood that they would need allies in the South if the region was going to be reconstructed. The majority of white southerners had already demonstrated their reactionary preferences when they voted for former Confederates and supported the Black Codes. Consequently, by 1868 many white Republicans were open to the prospect of extending full citizenship to former slaves.

Black southerners did everything within their power to speed the evolution of northern attitudes. Within months of the end of the Civil War former slaves in the South had gathered in conventions to proclaim their vision for their region and their race. Contrasting their devotion to the Union with the treason of their white neighbors, black southerners also stressed that the reconstruction of the former Confederacy could not proceed without their participation. And in the name of justice, the sacrifice of northerners, and the nation’s revolutionary heritage, . Most white northerners were reticent to embrace these demands in 1865. Within two years white southern intransigence, African American appeals, and political necessity convinced many northern Republicans that extending citizenship to former slaves was a prerequisite for the restoration of the Union.

But how could the guarantees of citizenship be extended to blacks when states had traditionally been the guarantors of rights and the former states of the Confederacy were now controlled by white southerners who championed white supremacy? The resolution of this conundrum was the Military Reconstruction Act (1867). It divided the states of the South into military districts under federal military command. No southern state could return to civilian rule until its voters, including black men, framed a state constitution that guaranteed black suffrage. In addition, each southern state had to ratify the to the federal Constitution. The Fourteenth Amendment was multi-purpose constitutional device that was intended to resolve several of the questions hanging over the nation. It ended the president’s power of granting easy pardons to Confederate leaders. Most important, it established a constitutional guarantee of basic citizenship for all Americans, including African Americans. By defining as an American citizen anyone born in the United States or naturalized here, the amendment prohibited states from depriving any person, of “life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” At the very least, the amendment established a national benchmark for citizenship.

It is worth pausing for a moment and acknowledging just how extraordinary the developments in 1867—the Military Reconstruction Act and the Fourteenth Amendment—were. The United States made itself unique among modern slave societies when it gave to former slaves almost immediately after emancipation. Whereas elsewhere—Jamaica, Haiti, Brazil, etc.—virtually no former slaves were enfranchised, in the United States former slaves and their former masters competed for political power two years after the abolition of slavery.

Once the franchise was extended to blacks through the Military Reconstruction Act, the political mobilization of blacks took place with lightening speed. Throughout Reconstruction, when not deterred by violence, blacks participated in extraordinary numbers in elections. Their turnout in some instances approached 90 percent. Indeed, because black political mobilization was of paramount importance to the success of the Republican Party, Republicans in Congress pushed for the ratification of the in 1870. Despite some glaring loopholes that would be later exploited to restrict the right to vote, the Fifteenth Amendment expanded on the implications of the Fourteenth Amendment and guaranteed the right to vote to all male citizens. The crucial point is that the definition of citizenship in the United States expanded substantially during Reconstruction era and by 1870 in principle, all African American men were American citizens. (It would be another half century until comparable rights were extended to black and white women.)

The participants in Reconstruction fully understood that contests over political and civil rights could not be isolated from the economic reconstruction of the South and the nation. For blacks, the end of slavery of course did not mean the end of work, but rather an end to forced labor. Blacks relished the prospect of receiving the benefits of their own labor. But the vast majority of blacks emerged from slavery lacking the ability to buy land and confronted by a white community opposed to extending credit to blacks or to selling them property. At the same time, that whites looked for a system of labor and the Black Codes to bind blacks to the land, as slavery had, freed people coveted land of their own and struggled to be masters of their own time and labor.

Former slave owners in the South were vigilant about protecting their interests. Before the Civil War labor was the key to wealth in the South; after the war land was the key. White landowners understood the power the new circumstances gave them, but they could not control the largest external forces that shaped the region’s economy. It was these powerful national and international forces that guaranteed the restored nation had a more unif ied economy than ever before.

Railroads helped open the South's economy to national forces.Arguably again. The late 1860s and 1870s were a period of breakneck railroad construction and consolidation. Although it is commonplace to dwell on the completion of a transcontinental rail line in 1869, the extensive reconstruction and expansion of southern railroads destroyed during the Civil War was of equal importance. Northern railroad companies and investors loomed large in these developments. Nothing more dramatically symbolized the emerging integrated national market than the massive regional effort on a single day in 1886 when all of the small gauge rail lines in the South were moved several inches wider and realigned with the rail lines of the North.

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In short, the South was effectively brought into a national system of credit and labor as a result of Reconstruction. “Free” labor, rather than some system of coerced labor would prevail in the region. Neither serfdom nor peasantry would replace slavery. And southern landowners and freedmen, whether they wanted to or not, were incorporated into the national credit markets.

Let us now take stock of the answers to the questions that we began with. On what terms would the nation be reunited? In short, on national terms. Property was not expropriated or redistributed in the South. Reforms that were imposed on the South—the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, for example—applied to the entire nation.

What implications did the Civil War have for citizenship? The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments represented stunning expansions of the rights of citizenship to former slaves. Even during the depths of the Jim Crow era in the early twentieth century, white supremacists never succeeded in returning citizenship to its pre-Civil War boundaries. African Americans especially insisted that they may have been deprived of their rights after the Civil War but they had neither surrendered nor lost their claim to those rights.

What would be the future of the restored nation’s economy? In simplest terms, Abraham Lincoln’s famous observation that a house divided cannot stand was translated into policy. However impoverished and credit starved, the former Confederacy was integrated back into the national economy , laying the foundation for the future emergence of the most dynamic industrial economy in the world. African Americans would not be enslaved or assigned to a separate economic status. But nor would African Americans as a group be provided with any resources with which to compete.

Guiding Student Discussion

Possible student perceptions of Reconstruction Aside from the challenge of organizing the complex events of the Reconstruction era into a narrative accessible to students, the biggest challenge is to help students understand what was possible and what was not possible after the Civil War. Students, for example, may be inclined to believe that white Americans were never committed to racial equality in the first place so Reconstruction was doomed to failure. Some students may fixate on northern white hypocrisy; many white Republicans pressured southern voters to pass the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments even while they opposed its passage in the North. Yet others may emphasize that citizenship rights for blacks were hollow because blacks had no economic resources; blacks in postwar America could not easily escape an economic system that was slavery by another name. Each of these positions is worth discussion, but each tends to flatten out the motivations and behavior of the actors in the drama of Reconstruction. And virtually all of these interpretations presumed that the outcome of Reconstruction was both inevitable and wholly outside the hands of African Americans.

Ask students to design their own version of Reconstruction. One approach that I have adopted in hopes of countering these tendencies is to ask students to state their “first principles” that they think Reconstruction should have pursued and established. If your students are like mine, many will propose that Reconstruction should have guaranteed equal rights for all Americans. I then ask them to define what those rights should have been. At this point, even students who are in broad agreement about the principle of equal rights for all Americans may differ on the specific content of those rights. For example, some may stress economic equality whereas others may emphasize equality of opportunity. In any case, the next step is to ask the students to think about how they would have turned their principle into policy. Those students who may have stressed economic equality may then sketch out a plan for “forty acres and mule” for each former slave. Those who stress the need for equal opportunity may sketch out the need for public education for freed people and other southerners. I next ask students where the requisite resources for these policies would come from. For example, where would the federal government have gotten the land and money to provide former slaves with land and livestock? If the federal government had expropriated land and resources from former slave masters, what consequences would that policy have had for private property elsewhere in the United States? (If the government could take lake and property from former slave masters, would it then have had precedent to later take land and property from former slaves?) What would the consequences of this policy have been for the production of cotton, the nation’s most important export? In response to students who propose universal public education, I ask them about the funding for these new schools. Who would pay for them? If taxes needed to be raised, what and whom should have been taxed? Should the schools have been integrated? If so, how would the resistance of white southerners to integrated schools be overcome? If not, would separate schools for blacks and white have legitimized segregation ?

Through this exercise, students gain a better sense of how all of the facets of Reconstruction were interrelated and how any broad principle was shaped by the circumstances, constraints, and traditions of the age. Equally important, students will better appreciate how astute African Americans were in pursuing their goals during the Reconstruction era. They recognized that the Civil War had ended slavery and destroyed the antebellum South, but it had not created a clean slate on which they had a free hand to write their future. Instead, black Americans were constantly gauging what was possible and who they might ally with to translate their long-suppressed hopes into a secure and rewarding future in American society.

The role of African Americans in Reconstruction The search by African Americans for allies during Reconstruction is the focus of another worthwhile exercise. It is essential for students to understand that African Americans were active participants in Reconstruction. They were not the dupes of northern politicians. Nor were they cowed by southern whites. This said, African Americans never had decisive control over Reconstruction. Whatever their goals, they needed allies. With that fundamental reality in mind, Ask students to identify the major stakeholders in Reconstruction. I ask students to draw up a list of the groups in American society who had a major stake/role in Reconstruction. Typically, students will identify the major actors as white northerners, white southerners and blacks. I then press the students to break those groups down further. Were all white northerners alike in their attitudes toward blacks? Were all white southerners? And were there any sub-groups of African Americans that should be distinguished? After this revision, my students typically distinguish between pro- and anti-black white northerners, elite white southerners, middling white southerners, blacks who were free before the Civil War, and recently freed slaves .

Once we have identified the actors in Reconstruction, we then systematically work thorough this list and consider what interests each of these groups might have shared. Put another way, on what grounds could each (any) of these groups found common cause with African Americans? Take middling whites for example. Many students may wonder why poor white southerners did not forge an alliance with former slaves. After all, they had poverty in common. Some students might suggest that poor whites refused to acknowledge their common condition with African Americans because of racism; a poor white man, in short, may have been poor but he could insist that at least he was a member of the “superior” white race. I also point out that poor whites and poor blacks may both have been poor, but they were poor in very different ways so that they were at best tentative allies. Poor whites typically were land poor; that is, they owned land but usually not the other resources that would have allowed them to exploit their land intensively. Black southerners were poor and landless; most had no significant holding of land to exploit. Consequently, when blacks called for expanded social services such as schools to meet their needs, they were implicitly calling for additional taxes to fund the services. What would be taxed to fund these new schools and services? In the nineteenth century, tangible property, and specifically land, was the principal taxed property. Taxes on the land of poor whites, then, helped to underwrite new schools in the Reconstruction South. These taxes, in the end, drove a wedge between poor whites and African Americans and ensured that black southerners could not take for granted the support of poor white southerners who bridled at paying taxes on their land to fund new schools. Or take the example of white northerners. Even some white Republicans who were unsettled by calls for racial equality could be allies of former slaves. Republicans believed that without the support of black voters in the South their party might surrender national power to the Democratic Party. Expediency alone, then, coaxed some white Republicans to support political rights for blacks. But as soon as the Republican Party garnered a sufficient national majority so that the support of southern blacks was no longer essential, these same northern Republicans urged the party to jettison its pledge to defend African American rights.

This exercise helps students see African Americans as actors in Reconstruction, but actors constrained by the actions of other actors. This exercise turns Reconstruction into a dynamic process of contestation, negotiation, and compromise, which, of course, is precisely what Reconstruction was.

What resources did the formerly enslaved bring to freedom? Finally, another possible approach is to focus students’ attention on the resources that African Americans could tap as they made the transition from slavery to freedom. I ask students to consider the needs that African Americans, as free Americans, had in 1865 and the resources they had at their disposal to allow them to survive as free Americans. This exercise prompts students to consider the resources and institutions that blacks already possessed in 1865 as well as those that blacks would subsequently need to build. In other words, many slaves possessed skills (some could read, some were skilled artisans) and had built institutions (particularly religious institutions ) that were foundations for black communities after emancipation. Taking these into account, students can then consider what additional resources former slaves needed and how they might have acquired these resources. This approach to Reconstruction inevitably leads to discussion of the possibilities and limits of black self-help as well as the prospects for meaningful assistance to blacks from white Americans. It also often leads to valuable discussions of the merits and drawbacks of the racially exclusive institutions that emerged during Reconstruction, such as schools and churches. Students gain a better appreciation, for example, of why blacks preferred schools taught by black teachers and black denominations even while students also recognize the subsequent vulnerability of these institutions.

Historians Debate

No era of American history has produced hotter scholarly debates than Reconstruction. Historians may have written more about the Civil War but they have argued louder and longer about Reconstruction. With a few notable exceptions, however, most of the scholarship on Reconstruction from the late nineteenth century to the 1960s ignored or denied the prominent role of African Americans in the era’s events. Blacks were rendered as the pawns and playthings of whites, whether they be white northerners or southerners. The most notable exception to this willful silence about blacks and Reconstruction was W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction (1935). Du Bois dissented from the then current interpretation of Reconstruction as a failed experiment in social engineering by placing the former slaves and the battle over the control of their labor at the center of his story. For him, Reconstruction was a failure not because blacks were unworthy of it but because white southerners and their northern allies sabotaged it. Not until the 1960s did a new generation of professional historians begin to reach similar conclusions. Spurred on by the civil rights struggle , which was commonly referred to as the “Second Reconstruction,” historians systematically studied all phases of Reconstruction. In the process, they fundamentally revised the portrait of African Americans. John Hope Franklin, in Reconstruction , Kenneth Stampp, in Era of Reconstruction , and others recast African Americans and their Republican allies as principled and progressive minded. By the 1970s, a subsequent wave of scholarship began to revise the largely positive take on the Reconstruction offered by Franklin, Stampp, et. al. Now Reconstruction was seen as an era marked by muddled policies, inadequate resources, and faltering commitment. William Gillette’s Retreat from Reconstruction (1979) was the fullest expression of this interpretation. Eric Foner’s Reconstruction synthesized the previous quarter century of scholarship on the period and offered the richest account yet of the role of African Americans in shaping Reconstruction. Foner also placed the accomplishments of Reconstruction in a comparative framework and concluded that the rights that the former slaves acquired during the era were exceptional when compared to those in any other post-emancipation society in the western hemisphere. Reconstruction may have left the former slaves with “nothing but freedom” but that freedom, Foner stressed, was written into the Constitution and was never completely compromised.

Since the publication of Foner’s work, most scholarship on Reconstruction has been devoted to topics that had previously been ignored by scholars. For example, the roles of black women , the struggle to develop a system of labor to replace slavery, and the emergence of black institutions have all been the focus of recent scholarly monographs. Two recent works that build on these works and suggest new directions for scholarship on Reconstruction are Heather Cox Richardson’s West From Appomattox: The Reconstruction of America after the Civil War (2007) and Steve Hahn’s A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South, From Slavery to the Great Migration . Richardson highlights the importance of the Trans-Mississippi West in the political machinations and economic visions of the architects of Reconstruction while Hahn highlights the shared ideological values and cultural resources that sustained southern blacks in their struggle for economic and political power in the postbellum South.

W. Fitzhugh Brundage was a Fellow at the National Humanities Center in 1995-96. He is the William B. Umstead Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Illustration credits

To cite this essay: Brundage, W. Fitzhugh. “Reconstruction and the Formerly Enslaved.” Freedom’s Story, TeacherServe©. National Humanities Center. DATE YOU ACCESSED ESSAY. <https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/tserve/freedom/1865-1917/essays/reconstruction.htm>

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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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Dates :	Dec 8, 1863 – Mar 31, 1877
Followed by :	Gilded Age; Jim Crow; Nadir of American race relations

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Reconstruction - Free Essay Examples And Topic Ideas

Reconstruction was aт age in America, comprising numerous leaders, objectives, and achievements. This means the rebuilding of the withdrawn states and the introduction of freedom into American culture amid and particularly after the Civil War. However, similar to everything throughout life, it came to an end and the result has been both a success and failure.

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The Reconstruction era, which followed the American Civil War, was a pivotal period in United States history. During this time, the country struggled with rebuilding the South, assimilating freed slaves into society, and establishing new state and federal laws. Given its complexity and significance, writing an essay about Reconstruction offers an excellent opportunity to explore racial, social, and political dynamics of that era. In this article, we will guide you through the steps needed to craft a compelling and insightful essay on this subject.

Writing essays on complex topics like Reconstruction can be a daunting task, particularly when you’re pressed for time or unsure about where to begin. Many students find themselves in this situation and often turn to StudyMoose for help. Whether it’s essays, research papers, lab reports, or other academic tasks, StudyMoose offers a wide range of resources to improve your studies. With expert-written samples, personalized writing assistance, and a variety of topics to explore, StudyMoose can be your go-to platform for academic support.

Begin with Preliminary Research

Given the depth and range of topics associated with Reconstruction, a thorough research process is critical. Start by reading primary and secondary sources to gain an understanding of the time period. Look at political speeches, laws, historical accounts, and scholarly articles to get a well-rounded view of the era.

Define Your Topic and Thesis

Next, narrow down your focus. Are you interested in the political, social, or economic aspects of Reconstruction? Maybe you’d like to delve into the experiences of African Americans during this period? Once you’ve decided on a specific angle, you can develop your thesis statement. This should be a clear, concise statement that serves as a roadmap for your readers.

Develop an Outline

A well-crafted outline can be your best friend when writing an essay. Organize your thoughts into an introduction, body paragraphs, and a conclusion. Make sure each section links back to your thesis statement and contributes to the overall argument you’re making.

Write the Essay

• Introduction: Start with a hook to engage your readers and provide some background on the Reconstruction era. Conclude your introduction with your thesis statement.
• Body Paragraphs: Each paragraph should tackle a different aspect of your thesis statement. Use concrete examples, historical data, and citations from scholarly sources to build your argument.
• Conclusion: Sum up your points and restate your thesis in a new light, considering the evidence you’ve presented. Discuss the broader implications of your findings and point out areas for future research.

Edit and Revise

Once the initial draft is complete, take time to edit and revise. Look for logical flow, clarity, and coherence in your argument. Double-check your facts and make sure you’ve cited all your sources appropriately.

Cite Your Sources

Don’t forget the importance of proper citation. Whether you’re using APA, MLA, or Chicago, make sure you’re consistent in citing your sources to give your essay credibility and to avoid plagiarism.

Writing an essay on Reconstruction is not only academically rewarding but also enlightening, as it allows you to explore the foundations of modern America. With thorough research, focused writing, and careful proofreading, you can craft an essay that is both informative and engaging.

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Reconstruction (1865-1877)

After the United States Civil War (1861-1865) devastated the country, President Abraham Lincoln aimed to reunite the nation as quickly as possible. Before the war even ended he had created a plan referred to as Reconstruction. However, a week after the war ended, Lincoln was assassinated and Andrew Johnson was sworn in as President. For a while, President Johnson followed Lincoln’s plan, but then implemented his own in May of 1865. Black codes were established in many states that curtailed the rights of African Americans. Congress responded with the Civil Rights Act of 1866, but that did not prevent states from passing discriminatory legislation.

Investigate this complex period of national rebuilding and retrenchment further with these resources.

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Civil war and reconstruction, 1861-1877.

Home — Essay Samples — Life — Reconstruction — Rebuilding America: Was Reconstruction a Success or Failure

Rebuilding America: Was Reconstruction a Success Or Failure

• Categories: American History Reconstruction

About this sample

Words: 408 |

Published: Jan 29, 2019

Words: 408 | Page: 1 | 3 min read

Works Cited

• Foner, E. (1988). Reconstruction: America's unfinished revolution, 1863-1877. Harper & Row.
• Franklin, J. H. (1961). Reconstruction after the Civil War. University of Chicago Press.
• McPherson, J. M. (1988). Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. Oxford University Press.
• Perman, M. (2015). Pursuit of unity: A political history of the American South. Oxford University Press.
• Richardson, H. S. (2013). The death of Reconstruction: Race, labor, and politics in the post–Civil War North, 1865-1901. Harvard University Press.
• Rosenbaum, R. J. (2017). Reconstruction: A concise history. Oxford University Press.
• Trefousse, H. L. (2009). The era of Reconstruction, 1865-1877. Columbia University Press.
• Woodward, C. V. (1966). The strange career of Jim Crow. Oxford University Press.
• Zuczek, R. (2018). Encyclopedia of the Reconstruction Era [2 volumes]. ABC-CLIO.
• Zuczek, R. (Ed.). (2021). A Companion to the Era of Reconstruction. Wiley-Blackwell.

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The Reconstruction Amendments: Official Documents as Social History

By eric foner.

Like other Radical Republicans, Stevens believed that Reconstruction was a golden opportunity to purge the nation of the legacy of slavery and create a "perfect republic," whose citizens enjoyed equal civil and political rights, secured by a powerful and beneficent national government. In his speech on June 13 he offered an eloquent statement of his political dream—"that the intelligent, pure and just men of this Republic . . . would have so remodeled all our institutions as to have freed them from every vestige of human oppression, of inequality of rights, of the recognized degradation of the poor, and the superior caste of the rich." Stevens went on to say that the proposed amendment did not fully live up to this vision. But he offered his support. Why? "I answer, because I live among men and not among angels." A few moments later, the Fourteenth Amendment was approved by the House. It became part of the Constitution in 1868. The Fourteenth Amendment did not fully satisfy the Radical Republicans. It did not abolish existing state governments in the South and made no mention of the right to vote for blacks. Indeed it allowed a state to deprive black men of the suffrage, so long as it suffered the penalty of a loss of representation in Congress proportionate to the black percentage of its population. (No similar penalty applied, however, when women were denied the right to vote, a provision that led many advocates of women’s rights to oppose ratification of this amendment.) Nonetheless, the Fourteenth Amendment was the most important constitutional change in the nation’s history since the Bill of Rights. Its heart was the first section, which declared all persons born or naturalized in the United States (except Indians) to be both national and state citizens, and which prohibited the states from abridging their "privileges and immunities," depriving any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, or denying them "equal protection of the laws." In clothing with constitutional authority the principle of equality before the law regardless of race, enforced by the national government, this amendment permanently transformed the definition of American citizenship as well as relations between the federal government and the states, and between individual Americans and the nation. We live today in a legal and constitutional system shaped by the Fourteenth Amendment. The Fourteenth Amendment was one of three changes that altered the Constitution during the Civil War and Reconstruction. The Thirteenth Amendment, ratified in 1865, irrevocably abolished slavery throughout the United States. The Fifteenth, which became part of the Constitution in 1870, prohibited the states from depriving any person of the right to vote because of race (although leaving open other forms of disenfranchisement, including sex, property ownership, literacy, and payment of a poll tax). In between came the Reconstruction Act of 1867, which gave the vote to black men in the South and launched the short-lived period of Radical Reconstruction, during which, for the first time in American history, a genuine interracial democracy flourished. "Nothing in all history," wrote the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, equaled "this . . . transformation of four million human beings from . . . the auction-block to the ballot-box." These laws and amendments reflected the intersection of two products of the Civil War era—a newly empowered national state and the idea of a national citizenry enjoying equality before the law. These legal changes also arose from the militant demands for equal rights from the former slaves themselves. As soon as the Civil War ended, and in some places even before, blacks gathered in mass meetings, held conventions, and drafted petitions to the federal government, demanding the same civil and political rights as white Americans. Their mobilization (given moral authority by the service of 200,000 black men in the Union Army and Navy in the last two years of the war) helped to place the question of black citizenship on the national agenda. The Reconstruction Amendments, and especially the Fourteenth, transformed the Constitution from a document primarily concerned with federal-state relations and the rights of property into a vehicle through which members of vulnerable minorities could stake a claim to substantive freedom and seek protection against misconduct by all levels of government. The rewriting of the Constitution promoted a sense of the document’s malleability, and suggested that the rights of individual citizens were intimately connected to federal power. The Bill of Rights had linked civil liberties and the autonomy of the states. Its language—"Congress shall make no law"—reflected the belief that concentrated power was a threat to freedom. Now, rather than a threat to liberty, the federal government, declared Charles Sumner, the abolitionist US senator from Massachusetts, had become "the custodian of freedom." The Reconstruction Amendments assumed that rights required political power to enforce them. They not only authorized the federal government to override state actions that deprived citizens of equality, but each ended with a clause empowering Congress to "enforce" them with "appropriate legislation." Limiting the privileges of citizenship to white men had long been intrinsic to the practice of American democracy. Only in an unparalleled crisis could these limits have been superseded, even temporarily, by the vision of an egalitarian republic embracing black Americans as well as white and presided over by the federal government. Constitutional amendments are often seen as dry documents, of interest only to specialists in legal history. In fact, as the amendments of the Civil War era reveal, they can open a window onto broad issues of political and social history. The passage of these amendments reflected the immense changes American society experienced during its greatest crisis. The amendments reveal the intersection of political debates at the top of society and the struggles of African Americans to breathe substantive life into the freedom they acquired as a result of the Civil War. Their failings—especially the fact that they failed to extend to women the same rights of citizenship afforded black men—suggest the limits of change even at a time of revolutionary transformation. Moreover, the history of these amendments underscores that rights, even when embedded in the Constitution, are not self-enforcing and cannot be taken for granted. Reconstruction proved fragile and short-lived. Traditional ideas of racism and localism reasserted themselves, Ku Klux Klan violence disrupted the Southern Republican party, and the North retreated from the ideal of equality. Increasingly, the Supreme Court reinterpreted the Fourteenth Amendment to eviscerate its promise of equal citizenship. By the turn of the century, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments had become dead letters throughout the South. A new racial system had been put in place, resting on the disenfranchisement of black voters, segregation in every area of life, unequal education and job opportunities, and the threat of violent retribution against those who challenged the new order. The blatant violation of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments occurred with the acquiescence of the entire nation. Not until the 1950s and 1960s did a mass movement of black southerners and white supporters, coupled with a newly activist Supreme Court, reinvigorate the Reconstruction Amendments as pillars of racial justice. Today, in continuing controversies over abortion rights, affirmative action, the rights of homosexuals, and many other issues, the interpretation of these amendments, especially the Fourteenth, remains a focus of judicial decision-making and political debate. We have not yet created the "perfect republic" of which Stevens dreamed. But more Americans enjoy more rights and freedoms than ever before in our history.

Eric Foner , the DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University, is the author of numerous books on the Civil War and Reconstruction. His most recent book, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (2010), has received the Pulitzer, Bancroft, and Lincoln Prizes.

Suggested Sources

Books and printed materials.

A selection of relevant books by the author of this essay: Foner, Eric. Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction. New York: Knopf, 2005.

Foner, Eric. Nothing But Freedom: Emancipation and Its Legacy. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007.

Foner, Eric. Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1807. New York: Perennial Classics, 2002.

On the adoption of the Reconstruction Amendments: Maltz, Earl M. Civil Rights, the Constitution, and Congress, 1863–1869 . Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1990.

The Reconstruction Amendments’ Debates: The Legislative History and Contemporary Debates in Congress on the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments . Richmond: Commission on Constitutional Government, 1963.

Richards, David A. Conscience and the Constitution: History, Theory, and Law of the Reconstruction Amendments. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993.

On Thaddeus Stevens: Stevens, Thaddeus. The Selected Papers of Thaddeus Stevens. Beverly Wilson Palmer and Holly Byers Ochoa, eds. 2 vols. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997.

Internet Resources

Yale University’s "Avalon Project" for a multitude of documents related to American legal and constitutional history:  http://avalon.law.yale.edu/default.asp

For images of manuscript copies of the amendments, transcripts of their texts, and brief background information, see the National Archives’ "Our Documents" site: http://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?doc=40 [Thirteenth Amendment] http://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?doc=43 [Fourteenth Amendment] http://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?doc=44 [Fifteenth Amendment]

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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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Reconstruction Era Essay

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America’s Reconstruction Era Essay

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Social and Government Institutions

The black codes of mississippi, ku klux klan.

The post-war period introduced many significant challenges to the lives of newly-freed slaves. With the emancipation of four million African Americans, the problem of their education and training arose. Three social and governmental structures attempted to tackle the issue. Those were the black church, the black school, and the Freedmen’s Bureau. The number of members of the African Methodist Episcopal Church increased ten-fold by 1876. At that time churches were the central institutions governing the day-to-day life of black communities.

The African-American places of worship gave rise to schools, which were an outgrowth of missionary missions of several religious bodies. Education was the most important issue for black voters and legislators alike. The calls for universal and free system started immediately after African Americans gained political power. Freedmen’s Bureau along with church communities formed a great moving force for establishing the public-school system for emancipated slaves.

Within a few years after a war, a couple of schools and colleges started educating black youth. Their efforts were supported by the Constitution of 1868. It provided that all children have a right to “a uniform system of free public schools by taxation or otherwise.” The movement developed rapidly and by 1877 more than a million black kids were studying.

In an attempt to create a government institution that would guarantee social and economic liberties and rights of the newly emancipated African Americans the Freedmen’s Bureau was established. The agency achieved great advances in a relatively short period of time. Discussing it in 1865, Carl Schurz stated that the organization helped to advance much of the workforce in the South and kept it from “falling at once into the chaos.”

Even though it was the agency that supported the development of black and prevented the clashes between different elements of the society, it encountered solid resistance from South and North alike. The main criticism of the Freedmen’s Bureau was over its excessive paternalism and socialistic structure.

The Black Codes of Mississippi are a series of laws passed by the government of Southern States in the post-Civil War period. They were meant to restrict freedoms of newly emancipated slaves. According to a clause in The Civil Rights of Freedmen in Mississippi law, African Americans were denied the right to “rent or lease any lands or tenements except in incorporated cities or towns” that were under direct control of the corporate authorities.

Section three explicitly denied black persons the right for cohabitation and made interracial marriages illegal. Section seven of the law placed a restriction on the freedom of employment of freedmen and put them in control of their employees. Jorden Anderson in his letter to the former master complained about not being paid at all in Tennessee.

Mississippi Apprentice Law made it legal to hire black orphans and dependents and to recompense them with just food and clothing. It also permitted corporal punishment and stipulated that fugitive African-American apprentices should be returned and punished under the law for desertion. Thus, Mississippi Apprentice law legalized a new form of slavery under the guise of indentured servant agreement.

Mississippi Vagrant Law made a state of being unemployed for an extended period of time illegal and punishable by arrest. Section seven of the law denied African Americans a freedom of assembly. Moreover, sympathetic whites were equated with vagrants and could have been punished by a fine or a prison term of up to six months.

The backlash from the North and Republican part of Congress allowed to radicalize the rest of the Congress and to appropriate Reconstitution for the subsequent impeachment of the President Andrew Johnson.

Fredrick Douglass was an African-American leader and social reformer during the Reconstruction era when the rise of black activism created extensive civil mobilization of the black communities and numerous parades and meetings calling for the extension of political freedoms swept the country. In his speech to the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society he called against the virtual enslavement of African Americans by Nathaniel Banks’ policy.

Douglass claimed that it was a mockery of 1863 Proclamation that defeated intentions of the government denying personal freedom to black people. According to the policy, freed slaves were not able to decide the terms of their employment for themselves; they were forbidden to choose the place of work, employer and the amount of salary they could collect.

In his speech, Douglass also demanded suffrage for his people. He claimed that it must be immediately extended to African-Americans, as it is the universal right. Most importantly, he also wanted to end the restriction of women’s voting rights. Douglass argued that no class of people can be stripped off of their elective franchise on the grounds of their ethnicity or sex. He believed that it is a right worth fighting for.

In the words of social reformer, even if all leaders of Rebellion are killed the government will see a rise of a new wave or uprising. He claimed that not only Southern masters will be “surrounded by a hostile spirit”, but also that the Federal Government will be condemned in a similar vein to Austrian and France Governments.

It is clear from Douglass’s speech that life of newly emancipated African Americans in the South in the years after the Civil War was full of struggles and hardships. However, despite systemic racism, which was endemic to the political and social life of that era, such institutions as Educational Societies, Sanitary Commissions and Freedmen’s Associations stood for the assertion of freedmen’s rights and dignity.

The Reconstruction Era was marked by the rise of Ku Klux Klan. It was a violent movement that set a goal of defending the Republican Party by “whipping and killing.” The testimony of Harriet Postle serves as evidence for the egregious crimes against human dignity committed by the members of the organization. According to the victim of Ku Klux Klan raid, a group of several men came to her house in the middle of night. They were looking for her husband who had departed before their arrival.

Upon realizing that he is absent from the home, assailants brutally beat the thirty years old woman who was pregnant with a child. The members of Ku Klux Klan did not pay heed to women’s plea to stop brutalizing her and even attempted to strangle her. There were six kids in the house at the time. One of the assailants pushed the oldest sun against a wall so hard that a hand-size patch of child’s skin came off of his back.

“ Excerpts from The Black Codes of Mississippi, 1865 ”. Web.

Jourdon Andersen, “To My Old Master”. Web.

Frederick Douglass, “ What the Black Man Wants ” 2016. Web.

United States Congress, “ Testimony on Ku Klux Klan in Congressional Hearing ” 2016. Web.

William E. B. Du Bois, “Reconstruction and its Benefits,” The American Historical Review 15 (1910): 781.

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Reconstruction: A New Primary Source Set for Teachers from the Library of Congress

July 16, 2024

Posted by: Colleen Smith

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In the wake of the American Civil War, the United States faced the enormous responsibility of rebuilding a fragile union of states. What’s more, while the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery, it did not confer citizenship on the formerly enslaved. What would it mean to define and create a society in which formerly enslaved people could fully and freely participate?

A new primary source set from the Library of Congress supports teachers and students in investigating the historical period of Reconstruction. The collection of primary sources highlights aspects of various social, political, and cultural changes from the time as well as their legacy today.

Sources include newspaper articles from the Black press, photographs of African American students attending newly formed schools, political cartoons that capture the backlash to Reconstruction policies, and correspondence between generals overseeing military districts in the South.

We hope that this set will spark ideas for use in the classroom and beyond. Keep an eye out for future posts about particular sources from the set, strategies for engaging students, and additional resources that support teaching and learning about Reconstruction.

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New Times, New Thinking.

• The Weekend Essay

The neoliberal battle for Ukraine’s reconstruction 

The country’s postwar future is almost as riven as the war itself.

By Lily Lynch

At a breakfast discussion at Davos in January 2023, the BlackRock CEO Larry Fink said that Ukraine’s postwar recovery could become “a beacon to the rest of the world about the power of capitalism”. The scene could have been a parody of Russian propaganda: the head of an American asset firm telling a rapt crowd of the Western business and political elite that Ukraine’s reconstruction would not only be a cash cow but would be touted as a capitalist success story – presumably something to congratulate themselves about at future breakfasts in Davos. For Fink, Ukraine’s reconstruction presented not just a business opportunity but an ideological one. If Western political leaders saw the war in Ukraine as an occasion to reinvigorate EU and Nato enlargement, then Fink and his ilk viewed it as an opportunity to revive a waning faith in capitalism .

The idea sounds somehow familiar. Fink’s words reflect the continuation of a more than 30-year project adopted by – and in some ways, imposed on – Ukraine and its neighbours. The “disaster capitalism” of the current war was preceded by the administration of 1990s “shock therapy”, a series of radical neoliberal reforms following the fall of the Soviet Union, from which the country never fully recovered. The current war has introduced an innovation on the old formula: the fusion of neoliberal economic policies with cowboy advances in technology, particularly artificial intelligence (AI) and digitalisation. Wartime Ukraine has already seen a dramatic influx of Western donor funds, consultants, experts, engineers and Silicon Valley venture capital. The result has been radical experiments in the introduction of AI-enhanced platforms for mine clearance and the rapid collation of commercial satellite data (both supplied by Peter Thiel’s Palantir); and economic strategies like the “fast state”, a Ukrainian government proposal that envisions a state so streamlined that it “disappears in one’s own efficiency”.

Ukraine’s reconstruction will be an unimaginably daunting task. The World Bank recently assessed that it would cost close to $500bn. Beyond the staggering cost in human life, war has devastated the economy: in the first year of the conflict, the country lost between 30-35 per cent of its GDP. Poverty more than quadrupled and one in three families are now food insecure . Over 15 per cent of Ukraine’s territory – comprising some of the most fertile farmland on Earth – is now contaminated with landmines and unexploded ordnance.  

With devastation of this magnitude, Ukraine insists that reconstruction cannot wait until the war ends. In fact, the ideological and technological foundations of Ukraine’s reconstruction are being built now. Yet, as the political economist Oleksandr Svitych told me, the current strategy is misguided, reflecting “the global and still dominant liberal rationality, whereby everything must be modelled according to the market”.

Ukraine’s reconstruction is complicated by how it had already been mired in economic crises for years prior to Russia ’s war. When the country gained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, the early transition was ruinous. Privatisation of state property was rapid and largely arbitrary. An oligarchy crystallised in the 1990s, and proved to be one of the country’s most resilient institutions.

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“Post-Soviet transformation turned out to be de-modernising rather than modernising, with no new vector of development to replace a Soviet project which had itself been stagnating by the 1970s,” the sociologist Volodymyr Ishchenko writes in his book Towards the Abyss: Ukraine from Maidan to War . Through deindustrialisation, jobs disappeared. And soon, so did people. On the eve of independence, Ukraine had a population of 52 million; in 2020, it was just 44 million. Many of its well-educated, highly skilled labour force sought work abroad, and in 2020, Ukraine was one of the top recipients of migrant remittances in Europe with respect to GDP.  

Volodymyr Zelensky ’s party Servant of the People (SN) won power in 2019 in part due to his popular TV series of the same name, which satirised this post-Soviet condition. But while Zelensky’s populist campaign capitalised on dissatisfaction with the status quo, once in office, Svitych said a “turbo-regime of essentially neoliberal reforms” was introduced, including budget cuts, sales of public property and slashing of labour protections. Meanwhile, technology was adopted as a symbol of the modern government, and a ministry of digital transformation was established. Though it would be easy to dismiss as a gimmick, the idea built on one of Ukraine’s undeniable strengths: the country’s burgeoning IT sector. IT exports tripled to nearly $7bn a year between 2016 and 2021 alone. The “start-up nation” idea has become integral to Ukrainian national identity in wartime.

Yet some of the government’s early policies drew criticism. Beginning in 2020, Zelensky attempted to introduce reforms that would limit the role of trade unions and scale back regulations around hiring, firing and management. This drew backlash from the EU as it conflicted with the bloc’s “social market economy”.

Luke Cooper, Director of PeaceRep’s Ukraine programme at the London School of Economics, said that “while Ukraine’s trade unions had initially been successful in mounting opposition to reforms to the labour code that reduced collective bargaining rights, these were passed after the full-scale invasion in the context of martial law (with protests forbidden)”. The war also prompted further liberalisation, sometimes as a requirement of international aid: last year’s $15.6bn loan from the International Monetary Fund was reportedly conditional on Kyiv cutting back on social expenditures.

The government’s “fast state” scheme marries liberalisation with technology. The wildly popular app Diia, which was funded by the US Agency for International Development (USAID), places “the state in a smartphone”. It allows citizens to access a digital passport (the first in the world), birth certificate, register the birth of a child, and even report Russian collaborators. The app will also be critical to Ukraine’s war reconstruction efforts, as users can use the app to log war damage to property. With typical bombast, Ukraine’s Western partners are touting Diia as a revolutionary tool that will transform the globe. At an event showcasing the app in Washington last year, USAID administrator Samantha Power said that where Ukraine was known as the bread basket of Europe, the country would now also be renowned for the app, “an open source, digital public good”, a gift to the world. That objective would be fulfilled with Washington’s help.

The war in Ukraine has also been a testing ground for AI. The term “algorithm war” has been used to describe the race to develop and apply new technologies on the battlefield. For Western tech companies, the war was an opportunity to test their pioneering technologies in real time. The Silicon Valley firm Palantir has furnished Ukraine with cutting-edge AI that allows it to rapidly collate information from several sources, including commercial satellite data and app messages shared by soldiers on the ground. Previously, hundreds of analysts would have been required to do the same. Technology provided by Palantir can also map safe routes for Ukrainian drones, allowing them to circumvent air defences and Russian jammers.

Other Western companies have been assigned significant roles in Ukraine. Along with JP Morgan, BlackRock is assisting in the creation of a reconstruction bank, the Development Fund of Ukraine, which will be registered in Luxembourg; BlackRock will also coordinate investments in the economy. Ukraine “shouldn’t be talking to [BlackRock] or other big asset-manager funds whose model is very financialised and poorly calibrated to Ukraine’s specific needs,” Cooper at LSE told me. These needs include rebuilding critical infrastructure, providing housing to the internally displaced, and growing Ukraine’s production capacity. Predictably, Russian officials have seized on BlackRock’s involvement, claiming that Kyiv has “sold itself” to American firms. (Of course, officials there have said nothing of their own country’s long-running relationship with BlackRock, a major investor in Russian banking and energy enterprises until 2022.)

Critics are wary that foreign donors have reinforced rather than challenged the prevailing neoliberal approach of Western firms. “If you read USAID’s programmatic documentation, it emphasises the need for ‘entrepreneurship’, ‘empowerment’ and ‘resilience’,” Svitych, the political economist, said. “It may seem natural and even humane that donors encourage Ukrainian citizens to take control of their lives and become self-sufficient. The downside of this approach, however, is that it downplays structural inequalities – such as poor public infrastructure or lack of adequate labour protections – and injustices which the state – not individuals – has the mandate and capacity to redress.” 

Western donors have also promoted hollow anti-corruption politics, which play several important functions in Ukraine. The World Bank defines corruption as “the abuse of public office for private gain”, but that definition shields the private sector. It does not capture some major forms of malfeasance, such as the use of offshore networks, that do not involve the abuse of public office. Anti-corruption discourse is also employed as a catch-all excuse for the catastrophic failures of Ukraine’s transition to capitalism. In this self-serving view, the system itself wasn’t responsible; the failures of capitalism can be blamed on a few malign individuals.  

Unsurprisingly, tech solutionism has also merged with anti-corruption politics: Diia has been touted as an antidote to corruption. As Zelensky has said of the app, “a computer has no friends or godfathers, and doesn’t take bribes”. But it is also incapable of empathy, which may prove desirable when cutting social benefits. A “new social contract” announced by the government in March 2023 envisions a reduced role of the state, slashing its support for citizens to a bare minimum. The new plan involves the digitisation of benefit payments as a way of “strengthening control” over their allocation. In practice, this means that fewer people will be determined eligible for government assistance. 

Yet Cooper noted that there have also been tentative signs that the government is reversing some of the “liberalisation excesses” of recent years, such as rolling back unusually generous corporate tax rates. Cooper maintains that this shift was precipitated by wartime necessity. “You can’t fight a war with free-market economics,” he said. “You can’t make such enormous increases in defence spending without ending up with a state-dominated economy. And you can’t do that without raising taxes.”  

Ukrainian officials have also indicated that they might be more discerning about foreign investors. Last year, the finance minister Sergii Marchenko gave a speech at the London Ukraine Recovery Conference that reflected this shift. “Traditionally, we were open to any form of money,” he said. “Now we are not. If you want to invest in Ukraine, you must accept the priorities of Ukraine.” The nationalisation of strategic assets throughout the war has also prompted a backlash among some supporters in Washington. 

Among Ukraine’s most daunting tasks will be convincing the 6.5 million citizens who have fled the war to return and rebuild the country. The government is in an unenviable position: to maintain interest from foreign investors, who are typically drawn to the region for its cheap labour force, it will also need to ensure the repatriation of refugees, who won’t be keen to return if only low-paying jobs await them.

Cooper stressed that the “turbo liberal regime” of the past must be abandoned for good. “Fundamental to all of this will be actively growing the incomes of the working population and not relying on the myth of ‘trickle-down economics’.” The availability of good jobs will also be essential to reducing dependency on post-conflict foreign aid.

Ukraine’s recovery will take generations. There is no doubt that “shock therapy 2.0” has provided a valuable military, technological and economic testing ground for liberal ideologues, Western governments and Silicon Valley companies. But the more important question – whether these things will also deliver durable development, opportunity and security to Ukraine – leads to a far more ambiguous conclusion.

[See also: After Kursk: Who’s winning now? ]

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