The Impact of Reconstruction (1868-1877)

Reconstruction Acts (1867-1868): These acts divided the South into five military districts and mandated the states to draft new constitutions, which should grant suffrage to all male citizens regardless of their race or previous state of servitude.
14th Amendment (1868): This amendment granted citizenship to all persons born or naturalised in the United States—including former slaves—and granted them equal protection under the law.
15th Amendment (1870): This amendment placed a constitutional ban on any state denying voting rights to citizens based on race, colour, or previous condition of servitude.

Sharecropping and tenant farming: Despite emancipation, many African Americans fell into patterns of economic exploitation through sharecropping and tenant farming, essentially becoming tied to the lands of their former masters.
Rise of African American politicians: For a brief moment, due to the enforcement of Black suffrage, the South saw an unprecedented rise in African American politicians, many of whom were elected to high offices in southern state governments during the Reconstruction era.
White supremacist backlash: The emergence of African American political and economic power provoked severe backlash from white supremacist groups, most notably the Ku Klux Klan, which used violence and intimidation to suppress Black progress.

Radical Republicans: Characterised by their fervent commitment to the rights of freedmen, the Radical Republicans pushed for severe penalties against the South, and for more extensive protections of civil rights.
Impeachment of Andrew Johnson: President Johnson was famously impeached by the House of Representatives in 1868 for violation of the Tenure of Office Act, underscoring the deep divisions and conflicts of the Reconstruction era.

Compromise of 1877: The controversial election of 1876 ended with a compromise that effectively halted Reconstruction. Republicans agreed to pull federal troops from the South in exchange for securing the presidency for Rutherford B. Hayes.
‘Lost Cause’ mythology: Following the end of Reconstruction, this narrative was developed by Southerners to reinterpret the Civil War as a noble cause fought over states’ rights, downplaying slavery’s centrality to the conflict and romanticising the antebellum South.
Jim Crow: With the end of Reconstruction came the rise of Jim Crow laws, perpetuating a system of racial segregation, disenfranchisement, and inequality in the South that would last nearly a century until the Civil Rights Movement.