Reconstruction era

The Reconstruction era was the period from 1865 to 1877 when the United States rebuilt the former Confederacy and contested the rights and political status of formerly enslaved people.

Thirteenth Amendment: The 1865 amendment to the United States Constitution that abolished slavery, except as punishment for crime. It ended legal slavery nationwide but left Congress to define and protect freedom in practice.
Hiram Revels: A minister and Mississippi senator who became the first African American member of the United States Congress in 1870. His Senate service embodied Black political participation during Reconstruction.
Enforcement Acts: Federal laws passed from 1870 to 1871 to protect voting rights and suppress Ku Klux Klan violence. They gave the Grant administration legal tools to prosecute organized attacks on Reconstruction.
Sharecropping: A system in which tenant farmers paid landowners with a share of the crop they produced. It became a widespread labor arrangement, often trapping freedpeople in debt and dependence.
Fourteenth Amendment: The 1868 amendment that established birthright citizenship and required states to provide equal protection and due process. It made citizenship and equal protection central federal claims during Reconstruction.
Thaddeus Stevens: A Pennsylvania congressman and leading Radical Republican who advocated equal rights and federal reconstruction of the South. He pressed Congress to protect freedpeople and reshape Southern political power.
Ku Klux Klan: A white supremacist organization founded in Tennessee in 1865 that used terror to undermine Black freedom and Republican rule. Its violence made federal protection a life-and-death issue for Southern communities.
Black church: A network of independent African American Christian congregations and institutions that developed under slavery and expanded after emancipation. Congregations organized education, mutual aid, leadership, and political life in freed communities.
Fifteenth Amendment: The 1870 amendment prohibiting denial of voting rights based on race, color, or previous condition of servitude. It barred race-based voting restrictions while leaving other barriers available to states.
Charles Sumner: A Massachusetts senator and abolitionist who became a leading advocate of civil and political rights for Black Americans. His civil-rights proposals reveal the ambitions and limits of congressional Reconstruction.

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