Reconstruction

Main article: Reconstruction Era of the United States

Northern teachers traveled into the South to provide education and training for the newly freed population.

Reconstruction began during the war, with the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863 and continued to 1877.^[258] It comprised multiple complex methods to resolve the war, the most important of which were the three “Reconstruction Amendments” to the Constitution, which remain in effect to the present time: the 13th (1865), the 14th (1868) and the 15th (1870). From the Union perspective, the goals of Reconstruction were to guarantee the Union victory on the battlefield by reuniting the Union; to guarantee a “republican form of government for the ex-Confederate states; and to permanently end slavery—and prevent semi-slavery status.^[259]

President Johnson took a lenient approach and saw the achievement of the main war goals as realized in 1865, when each ex-rebel state repudiated secession and ratified the Thirteenth Amendment. Radical Republicans demanded strong proof that Confederate nationalism was dead and the slaves were truly free. They came to the fore after the 1866 elections and undid much of Johnson’s work. They used the Army to dissolve Southern state governments and hold new elections with Freedmen voting. The result was a Republican coalition that took power in ten states for varying lengths of time, staying in power with the help of U.S. Army units and black voters. Grant was elected president in 1868 and continued the Radical policies. Meanwhile the Freedmen’s Bureau, started by Lincoln in 1865 to help the freed slaves, played a major role in helping the blacks and arranging work for them. In opposition paramilitary groups such as the first Ku Klux Klan used violence to thwart these efforts.^[260]

The “Liberal Republicans” argued the war goals had been achieved and Reconstruction should end. They ran a ticket in 1872 but were decisively defeated as Grant was reelected. In 1874, Democrats took control of Congress and opposed any more reconstruction. The disputed 1876 elections were resolved by the Compromise of 1877, which put Republican Rutherford B. Hayes in the White House. He pulled out the last federal troops and the last Republican state governments in the South collapsed, marking the end of Civil War and Reconstruction.^[261]