Reconstruction Era - Overview

Overview

Reconstruction policies were implemented when a Confederate state came under the control of the Union Army. President Abraham Lincoln set up reconstructed governments in several southern states during the war, including Tennessee, Arkansas, and Louisiana. He experimented with giving land to former slaves in South Carolina. Following Lincoln's assassination in April 1865, president Andrew Johnson tried to follow Lincoln's policies and appointed new governors in the summer of 1865. Johnson quickly declared that the war goals of national unity and the ending of slavery had been achieved, so that reconstruction was completed. Republicans in Congress refused to accept Johnson's terms and rejected the new members of Congress elected by the South; in 1865 and 1866, they broke with the president. A sweeping Republican victory in the 1866 Congressional elections in the North gave the Radical Republicans enough control of Congress to override Johnson's vetoes and began what is called "Radical Reconstruction" in 1867. Congress removed the civilian governments in the South in 1867 and put the former Confederacy under the rule of the U.S. Army. The army conducted new elections in which the freed slaves could vote, while whites who had held leading positions under the Confederacy were temporarily denied the vote and were not permitted to run for office.

In ten states, coalitions of freedmen, recent black and white arrivals from the North (carpetbaggers), and white Southerners who supported Reconstruction (scalawags) cooperated to form Republican biracial state governments. They introduced various reconstruction programs, including the founding of public schools in most states for the first time, and the establishment of charitable institutions. They raised taxes, which historically had been low as planters preferred to make private investments for their own purposes; offered massive aid to support railroads to improve transportation and shipping. Conservative opponents charged that Republican regimes were marred by widespread corruption. Violent opposition towards freedmen and whites who supported Reconstruction emerged in numerous localities under the name of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), a secret vigilante organization, which led to federal intervention by President Ulysses S. Grant in 1871 that suppressed the Klan. White Democrats calling themselves "Redeemers" regained control state by state, sometimes using fraud and violence to control state elections. A deep national economic depression following the Panic of 1873 led to major Democratic gains in the North, the collapse of many railroad schemes in the South, and a growing sense of frustration in the North.

The end of Reconstruction was a staggered process, and the period of Republican control ended at different times in different states. With the Compromise of 1877, Army intervention in the South ceased and Republican control collapsed in the last three state governments in the South. This was followed by a period that white Southerners labeled Redemption, in which white-dominated state legislatures enacted Jim Crow laws and (after 1890) disfranchised most blacks and many poor whites through a combination of constitutional amendments and electoral laws. The white Democrat Southerners' memory of Reconstruction played a major role in imposing the system of white supremacy and second-class citizenship for blacks, known as the age of Jim Crow.