How long was reconstruction after the civil war

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. Emancipation changed the stakes of the Civil War, ensuring that a Union victory would mean large-scale social revolution in the South.

It was still very unclear, however, what form this revolution would take. Over the next several years, Lincoln considered ideas about how to welcome the devastated South back into the Union, but as the war drew to a close in early , he still had no clear plan.

In a speech delivered on April 11, while referring to plans for Reconstruction in Louisiana , Lincoln proposed that some Black people—including free Black people and those who had enlisted in the military—deserved the right to vote. He was assassinated three days later, however, and it would fall to his successor to put plans for Reconstruction in place. Apart from being required to uphold the abolition of slavery in compliance with the 13th Amendment to the Constitution , swear loyalty to the Union and pay off war debt, southern state governments were given free rein to rebuild themselves.

These repressive codes enraged many in the North, including numerous members of Congress, which refused to seat congressmen and senators elected from the southern states. The first bill extended the life of the bureau, originally established as a temporary organization charged with assisting refugees and formerly enslaved people, while the second defined all persons born in the United States as national citizens who were to enjoy equality before the law.

After Johnson vetoed the bills—causing a permanent rupture in his relationship with Congress that would culminate in his impeachment in —the Civil Rights Act became the first major bill to become law over presidential veto.

The participation of African Americans in southern public life after would be by far the most radical development of Reconstruction, which was essentially a large-scale experiment in interracial democracy unlike that of any other society following the abolition of slavery.

Southern Black people won election to southern state governments and even to the U. Congress during this period. Slavery is a legal and economic system where people are treated as property. Slavery in North America existed since settlement began in the 17th century.

Within the United States, by the time of the start of the civil war slavery had become extinct in the northern states, defined largely as north of the Mason-Dixon line that forms the boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland. Slavery continued to exist in the south until put down by the Union Army and abolished officially by the 13th amendment to the Constitution in The international slave trade was ended by the British Navy in the early 19th century.

Carpetbagger by Thomas Nast. Carpetbaggers was the term used to refere to Northerners who moved to the south during Reconstruction to profit from the situation in the territory. The name was a referece to the carpet bag luggage that many of the Northerners used.

Scalawags were Southern whites who supported the Republicans and the various policies of Reconstruction in the south. The name was originally a reference to low-grade farm animals. It has had three different manifestations in three different eras. The first era, when the group was founded, was in the aftermath of the Civil War, particularly during Reconstruction.

The Klan operated as a vigilante group that targeted newly freed black populations and Republican politicians in the Reconstruction governments of the former Confederacy. Though it was officially disbanded in , it continued to function well into the the early s. The Federal government passed a variety of laws and acts to dismantle the Klan in that period which had some success. The KKK did not resurface again until the beginning of the 20th century.

Nathan Bedford Forrest July 13 - October 29 Nathan Bedford Forrest was a Confederate cavalry leader. After the war he served in the Ku Klux Klan but distanced himself from them by denying any formal connection. He was responsible for officially dissolving the first incarnation of the Klan in though they continued to operate afterwards for many years.

Andrew Johnson December 29, — July 31, Freedmen's School in Beaufort, South Carolina, c. With the exception of top Confederate leaders, the proclamation also included a full pardon and restoration of property, excluding enslaved people, for those who took part in the war against the Union.

They considered success nothing less than a complete transformation of southern society. Passed in Congress in July , the Wade-Davis Bill required that 50 percent of white males in rebel states swear a loyalty oath to the constitution and the union before they could convene state constitutional convents.

The Wade-Davis Bill was never implemented. After the war was over, President Andrew Johnson returned most of the land to the former white slaveowners. Just 41 days before his assassination, the 16th President had used his second inaugural address to signal reconciliation between the north and south. But the effort to bind these wounds through Reconstruction policies would be left to Vice President Andrew Johnson, who became President when Lincoln died.

The plan also gave southern whites the power to reclaim property, with the exception of enslaved people and granted the states the right to start new governments with provisional governors. The rift between Congress and the president is complete.

May 1: Racial violence rages in Memphis, Tennessee for three days as whites assault blacks on the streets. In the aftermath, 48 people, nearly all black, are dead, and hundreds of black homes, churches, and schools have been pillaged or burned. June Congress sends the Fourteenth Amendment to the states. It writes the Republican vision of how post-Civil War American society should be structured into the U. Constitution, out of the reach of partisan politics.

The amendment defines citizenship to include all people born or naturalized in the U. It stops short of guaranteeing blacks the right to vote. The controversial amendment will take over two years to be ratified.

July: Congress re-passes its supplemental Freedmen's Bureau Bill. President Johnson vetoes it again, and Congress again overrides the veto, making the bill a law. July Riots break out in New Orleans, Louisiana: a white mob attacks blacks and Radical Republicans attending a black suffrage convention, killing 40 people. August "The swing around the circle. He asks popular Union general Ulysses S. Grant to come along. When crowds heckle the president, Johnson's angry and undignified responses cause Grant -- and many Northerners -- to lose sympathy with the president and his lenient Reconstruction policies.

Fall: Following the president's ruinous campaign, the mid-term elections become a battleground over the Fourteenth Amendment and civil rights. Johnson's opponents are victorious, and the Republicans occupy enough seats to guarantee they will be able to override any presidential vetoes in the coming legislative session. March 2: The new session of Congress begins to pass additional reconstruction laws, overriding President Johnson's vetoes and beginning a more hard-line attitude toward the South.

Known as Radical Reconstruction, the new policies divide the South into military districts and require the states to adopt new constitutions, introduce black suffrage, and ratify the Fourteenth Amendment. Grant that he intends to fire Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, who has been a consistent opponent of the president and is close to the Radical Republicans who dominate Congress. Stanton has refused to resign and Congress has supported him through the Tenure of Office Act, which requires the consent of Congress to removals.

At the same time, Congress has weakened the president's control of the army through the Command of the Army Act, which requires that all military orders of the President have the approval of the general of the army Grant. Johnson believes the Tenure of Office Act is unconstitutional, and hopes to defeat the effort to force Stanton upon him by employing the popular Grant.

President Johnson believes that Grant has betrayed him; Grant now openly breaks with Johnson. Winter: Black and white lawmakers begin to work side by side in the Southern states' constitutional conventions, the first political meetings in American history to include substantial numbers of black men.

May Having infuriated the Republicans, Andrew Johnson becomes the first president to be impeached by a house of Congress, but he avoids conviction and retains his office by a single vote. He will not get the Democratic nomination in the upcoming presidential election.