Chapter 22

The Civil War left the South physically devastated and economically shattered — its cities burned, its railroads destroyed, its currency worthless, and its slave-based economy abolished overnight. Nearly four million formerly enslaved people now faced freedom without land, money, or education, while defeated white southerners faced a wrenching new social order.

Reconstruction — the effort to reunite the nation and redefine the rights of formerly enslaved people — would prove one of the most contested and consequential periods in American history.

In 1865, Congress created the Freedmen's Bureau to aid formerly enslaved people and destitute whites in the war-torn South, providing food, medical care, and — most significantly — establishing schools that taught hundreds of thousands of Black Americans to read and write for the first time.

Though chronically underfunded and often resisted by white southerners, the Bureau represented an unprecedented federal effort to assist freedpeople in their transition to citizenship and self-sufficiency.

After Lincoln's assassination, President Andrew Johnson — a pro-Union Tennessee Democrat — pursued a lenient Reconstruction policy, quickly pardoning most former Confederates and allowing southern states to reorganize their governments with minimal federal oversight.

Johnson's leniency alarmed northern Republicans, especially when the new southern state governments began passing restrictive Black Codes and electing former Confederate officials to Congress, seeming to nullify the North's hard-won victory.

Southern states enacted Black Codes that severely restricted the rights of freedpeople, controlling their labor, movement, and legal standing in ways that closely resembled slavery in all but name.

Outraged, Radical Republicans in Congress — led by figures like Thaddeus Stevens and Charles Sumner — demanded stronger federal protections for freedpeople and harsher terms for the defeated South, setting up a direct clash with President Johnson.

Congress seized control of Reconstruction from Johnson, passing the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Fourteenth Amendment (1868), which granted citizenship and equal protection under the law to all persons born in the United States, including formerly enslaved people.

The Reconstruction Act of 1867 divided the South into military districts, required former Confederate states to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment and grant Black men the vote before rejoining the Union, and the Fifteenth Amendment (1870) explicitly barred denying the vote based on race.

Johnson's continued resistance to congressional Reconstruction, including his attempt to remove Secretary of War Edwin Stanton in violation of the Tenure of Office Act, led the House to impeach him in 1868 — the first presidential impeachment in American history.

The Senate acquitted Johnson by a single vote, but the episode badly weakened his presidency and cemented congressional Republicans' control over Reconstruction policy for the remainder of his term.

New southern state governments, elected under congressional Reconstruction with Black male suffrage, included Black officeholders for the first time in American history alongside northern "carpetbaggers" and southern white "scalawags" who supported Republican rule.

These governments faced fierce, often violent opposition from white supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan, which used terror and intimidation to suppress Black political participation. Northern commitment to Reconstruction gradually waned, and the disputed election of 1876 produced the Compromise of 1877: Republican Rutherford B. Hayes won the presidency in exchange for withdrawing the last federal troops from the South.

The withdrawal ended Reconstruction, allowing white southern Democrats to reassert control and begin systematically stripping Black Americans of the rights so recently won — a retreat from racial equality that would not be substantially reversed for nearly a century.