G08: American Civil War: Reconstruction & Redemption

The era of Reconstruction was from 1865 to 1877 when Americans tried to reunite a nation shattered by Civil War. It generated bitterness and controversy. The people who lived through Reconstruction viewed it from sharply different perspectives. Many white southerners saw it as a devastating experience, a time when vindictive northerners humiliated the South and delayed reunification. Northerners argued that forcible federal intervention was the only way to stop the old southern aristocracy from returning and subjugating their former slaves and to keep die-hard Confederates from restoring southern society to the way it had been before the war.

The Reconstruction implemented by Congress, which lasted from 1866 to 1877, was aimed at reorganizing the Southern states after the Civil War, providing the means for readmitting them into the Union, and defining the means by which whites and blacks could live together in a nonslave society.

Reconstruction is one of the least-known periods of American history, and much of what people think they know about it may be wrong.

1863
January 1: President Abraham Lincoln signs the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring that the majority of the nation's slave population "henceforth shall be free."

The period after the American Civil War is known as the Reconstruction era, when the United States grappled with reintegrating seceded states into the Union and determining the legal status of formerly enslaved Black Americans.
It’s also a time rife with historical misconceptions—and without looking close, it may be hard to determine what really happened.

Reconstruction, in U.S. history, the period (1865–77) that followed the American Civil War and during which attempts were made to redress the inequities of slavery and its political, social, and economic legacy and to solve the problems arising from the readmission to the Union of the 11 states that had seceded at or before the outbreak of war.

Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s documentary series, Reconstruction: America After the Civil War, explores the transformative years following the American Civil War, when the nation struggled to rebuild itself in the face of profound loss, massive destruction, and revolutionary social change. The twelve years that composed the post-war Reconstruction era (1865-77) witnessed a seismic shift in the meaning and makeup of our democracy, with millions of former enslaved people and free Black people seeking out their rightful place as equal citizens under the law.

Following the Civil War, Southern Democrats lost much of their political power, but many people were unwilling to accept this change. “Redemption” was the name given to the efforts of Southern Democratic political leaders and white supremacists who worked to undo gains made by the Republican party and black people following the Civil War. “Redeemers” referred to their actions as “redemption” because they believed they were “redeeming” southern states from the “misrule and corruption” of Reconstruction and Republican political leaders.

As southern states were readmitted into the Union, as former Confederates were granted amnesty and regained their voting rights, and as the Union army gradually withdrew from the South, it became harder for southern Republicans to hold onto power and for black Americans to hold onto their civil and political rights. Conservatives charged that Republicans were corrupt.

Over a century and a half after the end of the Civil War, the Reconstruction era that followed that conflict remains a critical turning point in the history of American democracy.

In the aftermath of the Civil War, African-Americans finally attained emancipation, citizenship, and the right to vote; these hard-won achievements, however, soon came under assault as pre-war socio-economic patterns re-emerged in the South.