Reconstruction Era

Reconstruction (1865–1877), which took place after the Civil War, was a long and difficult period in US history. The North and the South had just fought each other in the the country's bloodiest...

"Scalawags" were Southerners who were sympathetic, or perceived as sympathetic, to Reconstruction, which not only involved repairing and repatriating the South after the Civil War but also involved...

By the time Reconstruction came to an end in 1877, the northern states had largely underwritten the rebuilding of the southern states as well as stationed federal troops throughout the South to...

During Reconstruction, freed slaves faced an uphill battle as they struggled to find their place within a hostile society. Even though slavery ended with the passing of the Thirteenth Amendment—the...

The authors believed that the federal government had to protect the freed slaves because there was nothing preventing the white Southerners from creating laws that disfavored them. Although they...

The initial few years of Reconstruction were ones of black power and freedom. Recently freed black people, specifically on the coast of Georgia and the Carolinas, were able to claim land from...

Born in Georgia in 1815, Howell Cobb was an important politician who held a number of state and federal offices before the Civil War (1861–1865). He was a Democrat whose political career was often...

Following the Civil War, ownership of land and control of labor became major points of contention in the American South. Recently freed African Americans found themselves in a situation that very...

Although the era of Reconstruction helped to rejoin the southern states with North, it failed to have the lasting impact that was intended by many of the initiatives of the era. The progressive...

In order to answer this question, you will first need to determine what the goal of Reconstruction was. A thing is usually a success if it achieves its goals. Therefore, in order to determine if...

In the earliest parts of the Reconstruction Era, the Republicans found the black codes to be very objectionable because they seemed to indicate that the South had not learned its lesson from the...

Several historians refer to the War of 1812 as the second American revolution. However, historians are a diverse group and not always in agreement. In recent years there has been a move by some...

The Freedmen’s Bureau was a governmental agency that was supposed to do everything necessary to help the freed slaves make the transition to freedom. This was, of course, a massive undertaking....

From other questions that you have asked on eNotes, I believe that you are asking questions based on the primary sources in For the Record, edited by Shi and Mayer. I am basing my answer on the...

While they are not as widely studied as institutions like the black church, African American lodges and other fraternal organizations did play an important role in providing mutual aid to African...

There are at least two likely reasons for this. First, the freed slaves would not necessarily have trusted the federal government. There would have been little reason for them to assume that the...

The North was concerned with the South’s struggling economy because the North and South were back to being part of the same country. Since they were part of the same country, they were also part...

In answering this, we must first realize that not every freed slave would have had the same vision of freedom. Therefore, we can only generalize. The general consensus is that freed slaves wanted...

For the purposes of this answer, I will assume that you are asking about the formal enfranchisement of African Americans after the Civil War, not about the efforts in the 1960s to ensure that black...

In the notorious case of Plessy v Ferguson (1896), the plaintiff, a man called Homer Plessy, argued before the Supreme Court that his rights under the Fourteenth Amendment had been violated by his...

In the time right after the Civil War, the South tried to reinstate the social (and racial) hierarchy largely through the creation of the “black codes.” After this was done away with by the...

Although this is one of the most asked and pondered questions about the post-Civil War era, it is inherently unanswerable. We simply do not know enough to say. It is true that Lincoln proposed a...

While people typically see the Civil War as a war about slavery, it can also be seen as a war about the South’s right or ability to govern itself as it saw fit. When we look at the Civil War in...