Recontruction

Reconstruction, also known as Radical Reconstruction, was the period after the American Civil War. During this time the South was in political, social, and economic turmoil, and eleven Confederate states had seceded. In response, the Union attempted to regain order in the Confederate states.

In 1865, in an effort to assist former slaves, Congress established the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, also known as the Freedmen’s Bureau. It provided food, medical care, helped with resettlement, and its most notable task, it established schools. Over 1,000 schools were built, teacher-training institutions were created, and several black colleges were founded and some were financed with the help of the Freedmen’s Bureau. Despite the bureau’s successes, it was unable to cure all problems.

In the beginning, the Freedmen's Bureau did not suffer from lack of funding. The Bureau sold and rented lands in the South which had been confiscated during the war. However, President Johnson undermined the Bureau's funding by returning all lands to the pre-Civil War owners in 1866. After this point, freed slaves lost access to lands and the Bureau lost its primary source of funding.

The majority of historians believe that the Freedmen's Bureau made a very small impact, if any, on the freedmen during reconstruction. A few of the reasons for the Bureau's failures as a provider for social welfare include the following: lack of funds, weak organization of the Bureau's internal structure, opposition from conservatives, and apathy of the Southern community

Despite the many criticisms, the Freedmen's Bureau did help African-Americans gain access to the rights that they were denied during slavery. The Freedmen's Bureau helped black communities to establish schools and churches. Under slavery, blacks had been denied the right to education and religion. The Freemen's Bureau monitored the civil authorities in cases that involved African-Americans. Initially, the Freedmen's Bureau conducted its own court of law when it was illegal for a black to testify in court in the majority of Southern sates. The labor system of the South had to be completely restructured after the war. Many former slave owners attempted to trick former slaves into entering contracts under the same terms as under the slavery system. The Freedmen's Bureau acted on the behalf of blacks to negotiate fair contracts for labor and property.Freedom offered blacks the opportunity to establish a firm family structure. The Freedmen's Bureau acted as a clearinghouse of information to aide blacks in finding lost relatives and mediated domestic disputes.

In 1865 several Southern states passed legislation creating black codes. Depending on the state, these laws generally restricted blacks right to own property, restricted where blacks could live, established a curfew, and forced them to work as agricultural laborers or as domestics. The black codes were quickly eliminated when in 1866, a group of Northern congressmen, helped with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1866. The Act gave blacks the rights and privileges of full citizenship.

In June 1866, Congress passed the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, and it was ratified in 1868. It provided blacks with citizenship and guaranteed that federal and state laws applied equally to blacks and whites. With the