Reconstruction of the Civil War

Reconstruction of the Civil War

Introduction

The American Civil War (1861-65) ended with a victory for the Union over the secessionist Southern states. But the end of the war was just the beginning of a new chapter in American history. The following period of Reconstruction (1865-77), during which the Confederate states were reintegrated into the Union, was one of the most controversial chapters in American history. Well before Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered his forces to Union General Ulysses Grant at the Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865, effectively ending the Civil War, controversy raged in Congress and throughout the country concerning the terms under which the secessionist states would be allowed back into the Union (Horton 2005).

Of paramount concern was what role the federal government should take in the shaping of the political, economic and social fabric of the South. Integrating the roughly four million newly freed slaves into life in the new South was a particularly contentious issue. It was the issue of slavery that in large part had spurred secession of the Southern states in 1860 and 1861, leading to the Civil War, and dealing with the newly freed slaves was no less problematic. The Civil War had left the South dramatically altered; newly freed slaves struggled to survive in the new economy while co-existing with an often bitter and resentful white populace (Haywood 2007).

The Union victory in the Civil War in 1865 may have given some 4 million slaves their freedom, but the process of rebuilding the South during the Reconstruction period (1865-1877) introduced a new set of significant challenges. Under the administration of President Andrew Johnson in 1865 and 1866, new southern state legislatures passed restrictive "black codes" to control the labor and behavior of former slaves and other African Americans. Outrage in the North over these codes eroded support for the approach known as Presidential Reconstruction and led to the triumph of the more radical wing of the Republican Party. During Radical Reconstruction, which began in 1867, newly enfranchised blacks gained a voice in government for the first time in American history, winning election to southern state 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 violent backlash that restored white supremacy in the South (Foner 2008).

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 abolition of slavery a goal of the Union war effort. To do so, he feared would drive the border slave states still loyal to the Union into the Confederacy and anger more conservative northerners. By the summer of 1862, however, the slaves themselves had pushed the issue, heading by the thousands to the Union lines as Lincoln's troops marched through the South. Their actions debunked one of the strongest myths underlying Southern devotion to the "peculiar institution"-that many slaves were ...