American history of reconstruction

Introduction

Reconstruction was the attempt by the federal government of the United States to resolve the issues of the American Civil War (1861-1865), after the Confederacy was defeated and slavery ended. Reconstruction addressed how secessionist Southern states would come back to the Union, the municipal status of the leaders of the Confederacy, and the Constitutional and legal status of the Negro Freedmen. After the Civil War, brutal controversy erupted all through the South over how to tackle those issues.(Edward,215) The start of Reconstruction is often dated to the capitulation of the Confederacy in 1865, although some historians date it to 1863, the year of the Emancipation Proclamation. The legal amendments and legislative reforms that prepared the foundation for the most radical stage of Reconstruction were enacted from 1865 until 1870.

Discussion

By the 1870s Reconstruction had made some progress to supply the previous slaves with equal rights under the law, encompassing the right to ballot, and with education to achieve literacy. During Reconstruction, most states in the South established public education, whereas funding was variable. However, much of the initial progress towards equal rights was revolved back between 1873 and 1877, when conservative whites (calling themselves "Redeemers") took power all through the previous Confederacy. In 1877 President Rutherford Hayes removed federal troops, causing the collapse of the remaining three Republican state governments.(Edward,215) Through the enactment of Jim Crow laws and through extralegal means, the Redeemers subsequently enforced the system of racial segregation which stayed in place all through the South into the 1960s.

Bitterness from the warmed partisanship of the era continued into the 20th century. But in other ways whites in the North and South attempted reconciliation, which reached the size in the early 20th century. This reconciliation coincided with the Nadir of American race relations, which saw an increase of racial segregation all through America and the disfranchisement of most African-Americans in the South. (Taylor,56) However, the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments were constitutional legacies of the Radical time span that supplied the underpinning for later municipal rights legislation that was enacted in the 1960s.

Reconstruction came in three phases. Presidential Reconstruction, 1863-66 was controlled by Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson, with the goal of rapidly reuniting the country. It can be said to have started with the Emancipation Proclamation. The programs proposed by Lincoln and subsequently by Johnson (who by late 1865 had lost the support ...