The Reconstruction Era

The Reconstruction Era, 1865 to 1877, is the American historical period immediately following the Civil War, during which the federal government attempted to rebuild the defeated Southern states, reintegrate them into the Union, and define the legal status and rights of nearly four million newly freed African Americans. The period produced three transformative constitutional amendments, the Thirteenth abolishing slavery, the Fourteenth guaranteeing citizenship and equal protection under the law, and the Fifteenth prohibiting racial discrimination in voting, alongside the short-lived Freedmen's Bureau, which provided food, education and legal assistance to freed people, and a brief era in which Black men voted and held elected office across the South in numbers not seen again for a century. This progress met fierce and often violent white Southern resistance, including the founding of the Ku Klux Klan and other paramilitary groups, and Reconstruction ultimately collapsed as Northern political will faded, culminating in the disputed Compromise of 1877 that resolved the deadlocked presidential election by withdrawing remaining federal troops from the South. Their withdrawal opened the way for Southern state governments to impose the Jim Crow system of legal racial segregation and disenfranchisement that would endure for nearly a century afterward.