Reconstruction and the Post Civil War South
After the end of the Civil War, President Andrew Johnson’s adamant support of states’ rights brought about a weak form of reconstruction in the defeated southern states, which allowed the South to rebuild and pay down war debts, largely without federal oversight. As a result of Johnson’s leniency, most southern states enacted a string of laws known as the “black codes,” which severely segregated blacks from whites, as well as blocking their right to vote or finding livable employment.
Reconstruction Act of 1867
By early 1866, enraged northern congressmen passed the Freedman’s Bureau and Civil Rights Bills, intended to protect the rights of freed slaves, but when Johnson vetoed both bills, his actions caused a permanent rift with Congress, contributing to his impeachment in 1868. By late 1866, Radical Republicans took control over Reconstruction policies in the South, passing the Reconstruction Act of 1867—again over Johnson’s veto—which temporarily divided the South into five military districts, while forcing southern lawmakers to ratify the 14th Amendment, which broadened the definitions of civil rights for African Americans. Known as carpetbaggers or scalawags, Republicans also sent in temporary governors and mayors to ensure the rights of African Americans, making the period one of the most progressive experiences in the region’s otherwise dark history of racial segregation.
During Radical Reconstruction, African Americans were successfully elected to state and local office, and even to the U.S. Congress, but by 1867, southern whites had turned increasingly violent in response to carpetbag governments and forced racial integration, which in turn saw the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist organizations.
By 1874, after an economic depression plunged the South into widespread poverty, support for Reconstruction began to evaporate, leading to the Compromise of 1877, when losing presidential candidate Rutherford B. Hayes was handed the White House, in return for an end to Reconstruction in the post-war South. The back room deal with southern legislators would see a return to segregation in the Jim Crow South for nearly a century more, until federal legislation and the civil rights movement of the 1960s brought an end to one of the longest inequalities in American history.