Reconstruction, 1865–1877

By the end of this lesson, students will be able to:

• Distinguish Presidential Reconstruction (Lincoln's Ten Percent Plan and Andrew Johnson's lenient policies) from Congressional or Radical Reconstruction (the Reconstruction Acts of 1867 and the military occupation of the former Confederacy).
• Account for the content and the effects of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments and the order in which they were ratified.
• Explain the role of the Freedmen's Bureau (1865 to 1872) in providing schools, supervising labor contracts, distributing food rations, and offering legal aid to formerly enslaved people.
• Describe the scale and the geography of Black political participation during Reconstruction, including the roughly two thousand African American officeholders, sixteen members of Congress, the senators Hiram Revels and Blanche Bruce, and Louisiana governor P.B.S. Pinchback.
• Account for the economic continuity of the postwar South: how sharecropping and the crop-lien system replaced the plantation regime while binding most freed people and many poor white farmers to land they did not own.
• Identify the postwar political coalitions of carpetbaggers, scalawags, and freedmen, and account for the violent reaction organized through the Ku Klux Klan and the limited federal response of the Enforcement Acts of 1870 and 1871.

The Civil War ended slavery; Reconstruction had to decide what freedom would mean. The Thirteenth Amendment, ratified in December 1865, abolished slavery throughout the United States, but it answered only the simplest question. Would the four million freed people be citizens of the nation? Would they vote? Could they hold office, sign contracts, marry, testify in court against white people, send their children to school, own land? Would the Confederate states return to the Union under their own terms, or would Congress dictate the conditions of readmission? The twelve years that historians label Reconstruction are the answers, partial and contradictory, that American institutions produced to those questions (KC-5.3.II.ii).

Presidential Reconstruction ran first under Lincoln and then, after the assassination of April 14, 1865, under Andrew Johnson. Lincoln's Ten Percent Plan, announced in his Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction in December 1863, would have readmitted any former Confederate state once ten percent of its 1860 voters swore loyalty to the Union and accepted the abolition of slavery. The plan was deliberately lenient: Lincoln understood Reconstruction as a wartime measure to peel border states and unionist enclaves away from the Confederacy. Radical Republicans in Congress responded with the Wade-Davis Bill of 1864, which would have required a majority of voters and stricter loyalty oaths; Lincoln pocket-vetoed it. Andrew Johnson, a Tennessee Unionist who had been put on the 1864 ticket to balance Lincoln, inherited the policy and made it more lenient still. By the end of 1865, Johnson had pardoned most former Confederate officials, restored white-only governments to the former Confederate states, and presided as those governments enacted the Black Codes, statutes that criminalized vagrancy and idleness, restricted Black landownership, bound Black children to white employers as "apprentices," and channeled freed people back into plantation labor under conditions only marginally distinguishable from slavery (KC-5.3.II.C).

Congress refused to seat the senators and representatives the Johnson governments sent to Washington in December 1865 and opened its own investigation. The Joint Committee on Reconstruction reported that the white South had used Presidential Reconstruction to rebuild the antebellum order under a different name. Congressional or Radical Reconstruction began in earnest with the Civil Rights Act of 1866, the first federal civil rights statute in American history; with the drafting of the Fourteenth Amendment in June 1866; and decisively with the Reconstruction Acts of 1867, which divided ten former Confederate states into five military districts under federal commanders, required new state constitutions written by conventions elected by all male voters regardless of race, and conditioned readmission on ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment (KC-5.3.II.A). Tennessee, which had already ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, was exempted from military rule. The new state constitutions written in 1867 and 1868 were among the most democratic charters any Southern state had ever produced; many guaranteed universal male suffrage, established public school systems, abolished property qualifications for voting, and outlawed corporal punishment. President Johnson resisted at every step. He vetoed the Civil Rights Act of 1866 (Congress overrode him), vetoed the second Freedmen's Bureau bill (Congress overrode him), and was impeached by the House in February 1868 for violating the Tenure of Office Act. The Senate acquitted him by a single vote.

The Freedmen's Bureau, formally the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, was created by Congress in March 1865 and operated until 1872 under the War Department. Headed by General Oliver O. Howard, the Bureau was the federal government's first effort at large-scale social provision. It distributed roughly twenty million food rations to displaced Southerners of every race in the months immediately after the war. It established roughly four thousand schools, including several historically Black colleges (Howard University, Fisk University, Hampton Institute, Atlanta University), and educated roughly a quarter of a million freed people. It supervised labor contracts between freed people and planters, attempting to ensure that wages were paid and that freedom of movement was respected. It operated freedmen's courts that took testimony from Black plaintiffs against white defendants, the first time most Southern courts had done so. The Bureau was chronically underfunded, faced violent resistance from white Southerners, and found its land-redistribution mandate effectively gutted when President Johnson restored most confiscated Confederate land to its prewar owners in 1865 and 1866. The promise of "forty acres and a mule" that General William T. Sherman had issued under Special Field Order No. 15 was never fulfilled at scale.

Reconstruction produced the most racially integrated political order any Southern state had yet known. Roughly two thousand African American men served in elected office at every level of government between 1867 and 1877 (KC-5.3.II.B). Sixteen sat in the United States Congress; Hiram Revels of Mississippi was seated in the Senate in February 1870 in the seat once held by Confederate president Jefferson Davis, and Blanche K. Bruce, also of Mississippi, became the first Black senator to serve a full term beginning in 1875. P.B.S. Pinchback served briefly as governor of Louisiana from December 1872 to January 1873, the first African American to hold a U.S. governorship. Hundreds more served as state legislators, sheriffs, mayors, justices of the peace, and county officials, especially in South Carolina, Mississippi, and Louisiana, where Black voters formed a majority of the electorate. The integrated state legislatures of the Reconstruction-era South built the first universal public school systems any Southern state had ever known, abolished imprisonment for debt, reformed the tax code, and chartered new railroad and infrastructure projects.

Two new political labels named the Republican coalition that produced this result. Carpetbaggers was the Southern Democratic insult for Northerners who moved south after the war, allegedly carrying their belongings in cheap carpet-fabric suitcases; many were Union veterans, teachers, missionaries, Freedmen's Bureau agents, or businessmen, and many became Reconstruction-era state officials. Scalawags was the parallel insult for white Southerners who joined the Republican Party, drawn disproportionately from the upcountry yeomanry that had opposed secession in 1860 and 1861 and from former Whigs who saw a Republican coalition as their best route back to political influence. Carpetbaggers, scalawags, and freedmen formed the three legs of the Reconstruction-era Republican Party in the South.

The economic order that emerged from Reconstruction was less revolutionary than the political one. The plantation system collapsed almost immediately when its enslaved labor force walked away in 1865. Planters had land but no labor and almost no liquid capital; freed people had labor but no land. Out of that mutual squeeze emerged sharecropping and the crop-lien system. In sharecropping, a landless farmer worked a plot belonging to a planter or a country merchant in exchange for a fraction (typically a third to a half) of the crop. In the crop-lien system, the same farmer pledged the next harvest to a country furnishing merchant in exchange for the food, seed, tools, and clothing his family needed to survive the year. By the late 1870s, most freed people in the cotton South and large numbers of poor white Southerners were locked into a debt cycle in which the merchant set the prices, kept the books, and chronically left the family deeper in debt at the end of the year than at its start. Sharecropping was not slavery, but it was an economic continuity of slavery: the same families worked the same fields under conditions of severely constrained mobility and chronic indebtedness (KC-5.3.II.C).

The reaction to Black political participation was violent from the start. The Ku Klux Klan was founded as a Confederate veterans' fraternity in Pulaski, Tennessee, in 1866 and reorganized as a paramilitary insurgency in 1867 under Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest. By 1870 the Klan operated as a terrorist arm of the Southern Democratic Party in most former Confederate states, assassinating Black officeholders and Republican-allied white officials, beating and murdering Black voters, and burning Freedmen's Bureau schools. The federal response came through the Enforcement Acts of 1870 and 1871 (the third of which is often called the Ku Klux Klan Act), which made it a federal crime to interfere with voting rights and authorized President Grant to use the army and to suspend habeas corpus to suppress conspiracies against civil rights. Grant suspended habeas corpus in nine South Carolina counties in 1871, federal grand juries indicted hundreds of Klansmen, and the visible Klan organization was largely broken by 1872. The reaction simply changed names: the White League in Louisiana, the Red Shirts in Mississippi and South Carolina, and the rifle clubs of the "Mississippi Plan" of 1875 carried on the same campaign of voter intimidation under different banners. Northern public opinion gradually tired of military occupation, and a series of Supreme Court decisions in the 1870s narrowed the reach of the Reconstruction amendments. By 1877, when the disputed Hayes-Tilden election was resolved in Hayes's favor in exchange for the withdrawal of the last federal troops from the South, the political project of Reconstruction was over.

A common multiple-choice and SAQ trap on the AP exam blurs the three phases. Use this card set as a reference and as a discussion prompt.

Three amendments rewrote the Constitution between 1865 and 1870. Together they are often called the second founding of the American constitutional order.

Five sources sample the constitutional, social, and visual record of Reconstruction. Each is in the public domain at the named federal repository or scholarly archive.

1. (Causation) Account for why Presidential Reconstruction collapsed and was replaced by Congressional Reconstruction between late 1865 and early 1867. Identify two specific developments that radicalized Northern Republican opinion in that window, and rank them by causal weight.
2. (Comparison) Compare the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. Each one extended a different right; each one had a different ratification politics; each one was narrowed by a different line of Supreme Court decisions in the 1870s and 1880s. Which of the three was, in your judgment, the most consequential for the long arc of American constitutional law, and on what grounds?
3. (Continuity and Change) Sharecropping is often described as both a sharp break from slavery and a striking continuity with it. Identify one way the postwar labor system represented a genuine change for freed people and one way it represented continuity with the antebellum order. How would you weigh those two against one another?
4. (Sourcing) Read Frederick Douglass's argument that emancipation without the ballot is incomplete against the Mississippi Black Codes of November 1865. What does the pairing reveal about the historical situation that produced the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments? How would your reading change if you knew Douglass had delivered the speech in front of a hostile rather than a sympathetic audience?
5. (Causation) Account for the violent reaction to Black political participation in the postwar South. Why did the Ku Klux Klan, the White League, and the Red Shirts emerge in the years they did, and why did the federal response of the Enforcement Acts succeed against the Klan but fail to stop the broader campaign of voter intimidation?

Draft alignment — pending educator review. AP USH codes correspond to the official College Board Course and Exam Description (Effective Fall 2023, Version 1). Statements below are paraphrased in the CountryReports voice; refer to the College Board's published CED for verbatim wording.