In the stormy years after the Civil War, the endeavor to reintegrate Southern states from the Confederacy and four million newly liberated individuals into the United States was known as Reconstruction. The new southern state legislatures created draconian “Black Codes” during the regime of President Andrew Johnson in 1865 and 1866 to govern the work and conduct of former enslaved African Americans during their time in the South.
To some extent, Reconstruction provided significant milestones in black Americans’ human liberties that were achieved during the period post-civil war. During 1865 and 1870, Congress approved the “Reconstruction Amendments”, which ended slavery, guaranteed black Americans equitable treatment under the law, and allowed black males the right to vote.
Even though racial tension and Jim Crow laws weakened these constitutional rights, blacks continued to participate in politics. These amendments laid the legal framework for more excellent equal opportunity during the civil rights period of the 1950s and 1960s. According to historian Donald R. Shaffer, African Americans did not lose all of their advantages during Reconstruction.
During the Jim Crow period, the legality of African-American marriage and family life and the independence of black churches from white faiths was a pillar of power. Reconstruction was never forgotten and maintained as a source of motivation for black people. In comparison to enslavement, sharecropping afforded blacks a great deal of liberty.
Lincoln never outlined a detailed rebuilding strategy. Nonetheless, if he had survived, all proof indicates four possible reconstruction courses he would have taken:
Right to vote
If the Confederates desired pardon, Lincoln could not avoid demanding in full exchange democracy, or, at the least, suffrage on the basis of intellect and military service. However, if the Confederates refused to trade clemency for political rights, there was no sensible solution to black voting rights since only the newly liberated slaves’ voting strength could counter the political supremacy of the South’s undaunted whites.
Western modernization
A conflict between the free initially sparked the Civil War and slave states over the fate of the Western territory, and Lincoln saw the West as a necessary component of Reconstruction. He enacted homeland law, which allowed for the private ownership of vast swaths of public land. He committed government assistance for a transcontinental railroad that would transport the crops from those homesteads to international markets.
Economic integration
Economic success lends credibility to legislative desire, as Lincoln learned from his battle to escape poverty. “I want every man to have the opportunity, and I feel that a black man is entitled to it to improve his lot”, Lincoln said in 1860. However, economic potential in Lincoln’s society was related to land ownership, and freshly emancipated slaves had none.
Lincoln’s remedy for this imbalance was the establishment of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, colloquially known as the Freedmen’s Bureau. However, key figures such as Andrew Johnson took the helm of the reconstruction phase post-Lincoln’s death.
- Reconstruction in the United States
- The Reconstruction and the Civil War Impact on the US
- Reconstruction after the American Civil War
- Reconstruction in the United States: The Structural Racism
- Lincoln’s Plan for Reconstruction
- The Reconstruction Era in the United States
- The Golden Age: The United States during Reconstruction
- Reconstruction and Factors That Influenced It