Act That Allowed Confederates to Hold Office Again

Reconstruction (1865-1877), the turbulent era following the Civil State of war, was the endeavor to reintegrate Southern states from the Confederacy and four one thousand thousand newly-freed people into the United States. Under the administration of President Andrew Johnson in 1865 and 1866, new southern country legislatures passed restrictive "Blackness Codes" to command the labor and behavior of erstwhile enslaved people and other African Americans.

Outrage in the North over these codes eroded back up for the approach known equally Presidential Reconstruction and led to the triumph of the more radical fly of the Republican Party. During Radical Reconstruction, which began with the passage of the Reconstruction Act of 1867, newly enfranchised Black people gained a phonation in authorities for the first time in American history, winning ballot to southern country 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 tearing backlash that restored white supremacy in the Due 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 abolitionism of slavery a goal of the Union war endeavor. To do so, he feared, would drive the border slave states still loyal to the Wedlock into the Confederacy and anger more conservative northerners. By the summer of 1862, nevertheless, enslaved people, themselves had pushed the issue, heading by the thousands to the Wedlock lines every bit Lincoln'south 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 Annunciation, which freed more than than 3 1000000 enslaved people in the Amalgamated states past Jan 1, 1863, Black people enlisted in the Wedlock Army in big numbers, reaching some 180,000 by war's end.

Emancipation changed the stakes of the Civil War, ensuring that a Union victory would hateful large-scale social revolution in the South. It was yet very unclear, however, what course this revolution would have. Over the adjacent several years, Lincoln considered ideas almost how to welcome the devastated Southward dorsum into the Union, but as the war drew to a close in early 1865, he nonetheless had no articulate programme.

In a oral communication delivered on Apr 11, while referring to plans for Reconstruction in Louisiana, Lincoln proposed that some Black people–including costless Black people and those who had enlisted in the military–deserved the correct to vote. He was assassinated three days after, however, and it would autumn to his successor to put plans for Reconstruction in identify.

Andrew Johnson and Presidential Reconstruction

At the finish 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 correct to govern themselves, and the federal government had no right to determine voting requirements or other questions at the land 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 ground forces or the Freedmen's Bureau (established by Congress in 1865) reverted to its prewar owners. Autonomously from being required to uphold the abolition of slavery (in compliance with the 13th Amendment to the Constitution), swear loyalty to the Matrimony and pay off war debt, southern state governments were given costless rein to rebuild themselves.

As a effect of Johnson'due south leniency, many southern states in 1865 and 1866 successfully enacted a series of laws known every bit the "black codes," which were designed to restrict freed Black peoples' activeness 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 Agency and Ceremonious Rights Bills and sent them to Johnson for his signature. The kickoff bill extended the life of the agency, originally established every bit a temporary organization charged with assisting refugees and formerly enslaved people, while the 2d divers 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 showtime major bill to become police force over presidential veto.

READ More than: How the Black Codes Limited African American Progress After the Civil War

Radical Reconstruction

Subsequently northern voters rejected Johnson's policies in the congressional elections in belatedly 1866, Radical Republicans in Congress took firm hold of Reconstruction in the South. The following March, once again over Johnson'due south veto, Congress passed the Reconstruction Act of 1867, which temporarily divided the Due south into 5 armed forces districts and outlined how governments based on universal (male person) suffrage were to be organized. The constabulary 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 Subpoena (adopted in 1870), which guaranteed that a citizen'due south right to vote would not be denied "on business relationship of race, color, or previous condition of servitude."

Gyre to Continue

READ MORE: When Did African Americans Get the Right to Vote?

By 1870, all of the one-time 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'southward history. The participation of African Americans in southern public life subsequently 1867 would be past far the about radical evolution 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 fifty-fifty to the U.S. Congress during this period. Among the other achievements of Reconstruction were the Due south's starting time state-funded public school systems, more equitable taxation legislation, laws confronting racial bigotry in public transport and accommodations and ambitious economic development programs (including aid to railroads and other enterprises).

READ MORE: The First Blackness Man Elected to Congress Was Nearly Blocked From Taking His Seat

Reconstruction Comes to an Finish

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 Blackness, 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 concord on the South after the early 1870s every bit support for Reconstruction waned.

Racism was still a stiff strength 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 Autonomous Political party won control of the House of Representatives for the first time since the Civil War.

READ MORE: How the 1876 Election Effectively Ended Reconstruction

When Democrats waged a entrada of violence to take command of Mississippi in 1875, Grant refused to send federal troops, marking the terminate of federal support for Reconstruction-era state governments in the South. Past 1876, simply Florida, Louisiana and South Carolina were still in Republican easily. 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 Due south.

The Compromise of 1876 marked the end of Reconstruction every bit a distinct period, simply the struggle to deal with the revolution ushered in by slavery'due south eradication would continue in the S and elsewhere long later that date.

A century later, the legacy of Reconstruction would be revived during the ceremonious rights motility of the 1960s, as African Americans fought for the political, economic and social equality that had long been denied them.

READ MORE: Black History Milestones: A Timeline

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Source: https://www.history.com/topics/american-civil-war/reconstruction

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