1865-1877
RECONSTRUCTION:
Rebuilding and Redefining the South
Reconstruction (1865-1877), the turbulent era following the Civil War, was the effort to reintegrate Southern states from the Confederacy into the United States and to expand the rights of 4 million newly freed people.
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 enslaved people 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 with the passage of the Reconstruction Act of 1867, newly enfranchised Black people 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.
During this period many landowners turned to sharecropping, a type of farming in which families rent small plots of land from a landowner in return for a portion of their crop, to be given to the landowner at the end of each year. Sharecropping in the post-war U.S. enabled landowners to reestablish a labor force, while giving poor whites and freed Black people a means of subsistence. About two-thirds of sharecroppers were white, and one-third were Black. The system severely restricted the economic mobility of the laborers, leading to conflicts during the Reconstruction era.
Reconstruction ended in 1877, when federal troops were withdrawn from the South, leading to the rise of Jim Crow laws, which legalized segregation and discrimination against African Americans.
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