This article traces the political and legislative history of Reconstruction, the period from 1865 to 1877 during which the United States government addressed the readmission of the former Confederate states and the legal status of approximately four million formerly enslaved people. For analysis of competing interpretations and their ongoing influence, see Reconstruction - Historical Consensus and the related viewpoint pages.

Debates over how to restore the Confederate states began before the Civil War ended. In December 1863, President Abraham Lincoln issued the Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction, outlining what became known as the Ten Percent Plan. Under it, a former Confederate state could form a new government once ten percent of its 1860 voters swore loyalty to the Union and accepted emancipation. Lincoln also offered full pardons to most Confederates, excepting high-ranking military and civil officers.

Radical Republicans in Congress found the plan too lenient and argued that Congress - not the executive - held constitutional authority over readmission. Senator Benjamin Wade of Ohio and Representative Henry Winter Davis of Maryland introduced an alternative in February 1864. The Wade-Davis Bill required a majority (fifty percent) of a state's white male voters to swear the Ironclad Oath - attesting they had never voluntarily aided the Confederacy - before a new state government could be recognized, and mandated that state constitutions permanently abolish slavery. Congress passed the bill on July 2, 1864. Lincoln pocket-vetoed it at the close of the congressional session. Wade and Davis issued a public manifesto denouncing what they characterized as executive usurpation of congressional authority; the manifesto drew wide attention but did not alter Lincoln's course.

In March 1865, Congress established the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands - commonly called the Freedmen's Bureau - under the War Department. Commanded by General Oliver O. Howard, the bureau distributed food and clothing, established schools, negotiated labor contracts between freedpeople and landowners, and attempted to allocate confiscated and abandoned land. On April 9, 1865, Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House. Five days later, John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln at Ford's Theatre in Washington; Lincoln died the following morning, April 15. Vice President Andrew Johnson of Tennessee assumed the presidency.

Johnson's approach to Reconstruction differed from Lincoln's in tone and in its treatment of the freedpeople's legal status. He granted broad amnesty to former Confederates - including, by special pardon, most of the planter class - and allowed the reconstituted Southern state governments wide latitude in managing their internal affairs. The sole conditions he imposed on Southern states were ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment (abolishing slavery), renunciation of Confederate debt, and formal acknowledgment that secession had been void.

The Thirteenth Amendment was ratified on December 18, 1865, formally abolishing slavery throughout the United States.

The new Southern legislatures moved quickly. Beginning with Mississippi in November 1865 and continuing through 1866, former Confederate states enacted what became collectively known as the Black Codes - a body of statutes that restricted the labor mobility, civil rights, and legal standing of freedpeople. Mississippi's and South Carolina's codes were among the most restrictive. The codes required freedpeople to present annual labor contracts, imposed vagrancy and apprenticeship provisions that could bind black workers to specific employers, barred black people from carrying firearms or assembling without white supervision in some states, and excluded them from juries and testimony in cases involving white defendants.

When Congress reconvened in December 1865, it refused to seat the delegations elected by the reconstituted Southern states and established the Joint Committee on Reconstruction to investigate conditions in the South. In January 1866, Senator Lyman Trumbull of Illinois introduced a bill to extend and expand the Freedmen's Bureau; Johnson vetoed it in February. Congress failed to override. Trumbull then introduced the Civil Rights Act of 1866, declaring all persons born in the United States - explicitly including freedpeople - to be citizens with equal civil rights regardless of race. Johnson vetoed this bill as well, arguing it exceeded congressional authority and intruded on the rights of states. In April 1866, Congress overrode the veto - the first time in American history that a major bill became law over a presidential veto. In July 1866, Congress also passed a revised Freedmen's Bureau bill over Johnson's veto.

To constitutionalize the Civil Rights Act's guarantees, Congress drafted the Fourteenth Amendment in 1866. The amendment defined citizenship, required equal protection and due process under state law, reduced congressional representation for states that disenfranchised eligible voters, barred former Confederate officeholders from federal and state office unless pardoned by Congress, and repudiated Confederate debts. Tennessee ratified the amendment and was readmitted in 1866; the remaining former Confederate states rejected it. Johnson publicly encouraged Southern states to refuse ratification and campaigned against Radical Republican candidates in the 1866 midterm elections. Northern voters returned large Republican majorities to both chambers, effectively ending Presidential Reconstruction.

The new Congress passed the Military Reconstruction Act on March 2, 1867, over Johnson's veto. The law divided ten Southern states (Tennessee having already been readmitted) into five military districts, each commanded by a Union general and garrisoned by federal troops. Military authority superseded civil government in the districts. States could seek readmission to the Union only after convening constitutional conventions elected by universal male suffrage - including black men - drafting constitutions enfranchising black men, and ratifying the Fourteenth Amendment. Three supplementary Reconstruction Acts followed in 1867, specifying procedures for voter registration and convention elections. Congress also passed the Command of the Army Act and the Tenure of Office Act - the latter requiring Senate consent before the president could remove Senate-confirmed officials - as constraints on Johnson's executive authority.

In 1867, Johnson attempted to suspend and then dismiss Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, whom the Tenure of Office Act was widely understood to protect. The House of Representatives voted to impeach Johnson on eleven articles in February 1868 - the first impeachment of a U.S. president. The Senate trial in the spring of 1868 ended with acquittal; the final vote was 35 to 19 for conviction, one vote short of the required two-thirds majority. Seven Republican senators voted with Democrats and independents to acquit.

Under Radical Reconstruction, biracial Republican coalitions came to power in the Southern states. Black voters - who constituted the large majority of Republican voters in the region - elected black men to office at every level of government. Hiram Revels of Mississippi became the first black U.S. Senator in 1870; Blanche Bruce, also of Mississippi, became the second in 1875. Fourteen black men served in the U.S. House of Representatives between 1869 and 1877. Hundreds of black men served in state legislatures, and some held offices including lieutenant governor, secretary of state, and superintendent of education. White Republicans from the North - derisively called “carpetbaggers” by opponents - and white Southern Republicans - called “scalawags” - participated in these governments alongside black officeholders.

The Radical state governments established public school systems in the South, including schools open to black students, for the first time; funded internal improvements; and revised state constitutions to include broader democratic provisions than had existed before the war.

The Fifteenth Amendment, ratified on March 30, 1870, prohibited denial of the right to vote on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.

The Ku Klux Klan, organized in Pulaski, Tennessee in 1866 by former Confederate veterans, spread through the former Confederacy by 1868 under former general Nathan Bedford Forrest, who assumed leadership as Grand Wizard by 1867. The Klan and allied organizations including the White League and the Red Shirts used murder, assault, arson, and economic intimidation against black voters and Republican officeholders. A congressional investigation documented hundreds of murders and assaults between 1868 and 1871. Congress responded with three Enforcement Acts (1870-1871), the third of which - the Ku Klux Klan Act - authorized the president to suspend habeas corpus in areas under Klan domination. President Grant deployed federal troops and suspended habeas corpus in nine counties of South Carolina in 1871; federal prosecutions temporarily disrupted Klan operations.

The Panic of 1873 produced a severe economic depression and shifted northern public attention toward economic recovery. Corruption scandals in the Grant administration - including the Credit Mobilier affair and the Whiskey Ring - weakened Republican credibility nationally. In 1874, Democrats recaptured the House of Representatives for the first time since before the Civil War, signaling reduced northern support for active Reconstruction enforcement.

Southern Democratic and Conservative “Redeemer” movements escalated campaigns of paramilitary violence against Republican state governments throughout the mid-1870s. The Colfax Massacre in Louisiana on April 13, 1873 - in which an estimated 60 to 150 black men were killed by a white paramilitary force - was among the largest single episodes of political violence of the era. In the 1874 Mississippi elections, the so-called “Mississippi Plan” deployed systematic armed intimidation to suppress Republican turnout; Democrats took control of the state legislature and forced Republican Governor Adelbert Ames out of office in 1876. Similar methods were employed in South Carolina and Louisiana.

The presidential election of 1876 between Republican Rutherford B. Hayes and Democrat Samuel J. Tilden produced disputed electoral vote returns from three Southern states - Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina. Congress created an Electoral Commission of fifteen members, which voted along partisan lines to award all disputed votes to Hayes. In the negotiations preceding the commission's final resolution - later termed the Compromise of 1877 by historian C. Vann Woodward in his 1951 study - Congressional Democrats agreed not to block certification of Hayes's election; Hayes withdrew the remaining federal troops from the South. The last Reconstruction state governments in Louisiana and South Carolina collapsed within weeks. Hayes was inaugurated in March 1877; in April, the final federal troops departed. Redeemer Democratic governments assumed control throughout the former Confederacy by the end of 1877.

Following the withdrawal of federal forces, the Redeemer governments moved to restrict black political participation through legal and extralegal means. Poll taxes, literacy tests, grandfather clauses, and white primary laws progressively disenfranchised black voters across the South over the following two decades. The sharecropping system - under which tenant farmers paid a share of their crop to landowners, frequently combined with crop lien arrangements at high interest rates - became the dominant labor structure for black (and many poor white) southerners. By 1880, the large majority of black farmers in the Deep South worked as sharecroppers or tenant farmers.

The Supreme Court narrowed the reach of the Reconstruction Amendments through a series of decisions: the Slaughterhouse Cases (1873) limited the scope of Fourteenth Amendment privileges and immunities; United States v. Cruikshank (1876) held that the federal government could not prosecute private individuals for civil rights violations; the Civil Rights Cases (1883) struck down the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which had prohibited racial discrimination in public accommodations. In Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the Court upheld state-mandated racial segregation under a “separate but equal” doctrine.

Scholarly interpretation of Reconstruction has shifted substantially over time. From the late nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth century, the field was shaped by what became known as the Dunning School, associated with Columbia University historian William A. Dunning and his students. This tradition characterized Radical Reconstruction as corrupt, constitutionally illegitimate, and destructive to Southern society, and viewed the Redeemer governments favorably. These interpretations drew on sources produced largely by white Southerners and reflected their perspectives.

Beginning in the 1930s, historians including W.E.B. Du Bois (Black Reconstruction in America, 1935) challenged this framework by focusing on black political agency and the democratic accomplishments of Reconstruction governments. Revisionist historians of the 1950s through 1970s, including Kenneth Stampp, further discredited the Dunning framework. Eric Foner's Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (1988) became the most widely cited synthesis of the modern scholarly consensus, emphasizing the era's constitutional achievements and the role of freedpeople as historical actors.

The precise terms and significance of the Compromise of 1877 remain disputed; some historians consider it a formal bargain ending Reconstruction, while others argue the evidence for a specific deal is inconclusive. See Reconstruction - Debate.

Whether the failure of Reconstruction is primarily attributable to insufficient federal commitment, structural economic conditions, or the organized violence of Redeemer movements is a contested question among historians. See Reconstruction - Debate.

The extent to which the Reconstruction state governments were characterized by unusual corruption, as argued by the Dunning School, versus competent governance comparable to contemporaneous Northern states is a matter of ongoing historiographical dispute. See Reconstruction - Historical Consensus.

Whether Lincoln's approach, had he lived, would have produced substantially different outcomes than Johnson's Presidential Reconstruction is a matter of historical speculation with no scholarly consensus. See Reconstruction - Debate.

1. Lincoln, Abraham. “Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction.” December 8, 1863. A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents. Ed. James D. Richardson. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1897.
2. Wade, Benjamin, and Henry Winter Davis. “Wade-Davis Bill.” H.R. 244, 38th Congress. July 2, 1864. Records of the U.S. House of Representatives, Record Group 233, National Archives.
3. Wade, Benjamin, and Henry Winter Davis. “To the Supporters of the Government.” New York Tribune. August 4, 1864.
4. U.S. Congress. “An Act to establish a Bureau for the Relief of Freedmen and Refugees.” 38th Congress, 2nd Session. March 3, 1865.
5. U.S. Congress. “Civil Rights Act of 1866.” 39th Congress, 1st Session. April 9, 1866.
6. U.S. Congress. “Military Reconstruction Act.” 39th Congress, 2nd Session. March 2, 1867.
7. U.S. Congress. “Tenure of Office Act.” 39th Congress, 2nd Session. March 2, 1867.
8. U.S. House of Representatives. “Articles of Impeachment Against Andrew Johnson.” February 24, 1868.
9. U.S. Congress. “Ku Klux Klan Act.” 42nd Congress, 1st Session. April 20, 1871.
10. Joint Select Committee to Inquire into the Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States. 13 vols. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1872.
11. Slaughterhouse Cases. 83 U.S. 36 (1873).
12. United States v. Cruikshank. 92 U.S. 542 (1876).
13. Civil Rights Cases. 109 U.S. 3 (1883).
14. Plessy v. Ferguson. 163 U.S. 537 (1896).
15. Du Bois, W.E.B. Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1935.
16. Dunning, William A. Reconstruction, Political and Economic, 1865-1877. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1907.
17. Foner, Eric. Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877. New York: Harper & Row, 1988.
18. Stampp, Kenneth M. The Era of Reconstruction, 1865-1877. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965.
19. Woodward, C. Vann. Reunion and Reaction: The Compromise of 1877 and the End of Reconstruction. Boston: Little, Brown, 1951.
20. Litwack, Leon F. Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979.