Concept

Reconstruction

The post-Civil War process (roughly 1865-1877) of readmitting the former Confederate states to the Union and defining the citizenship and rights of formerly enslaved people.

Reconstruction refers both to the federal policies enacted between 1865 and 1877 to reintegrate the former Confederate states into the Union, and to the broader social transformation attempted during that period: establishing the legal freedom, citizenship, and voting rights of nearly four million formerly enslaved Black Americans. Historians disagree sharply about how to periodize and evaluate Reconstruction, but most distinguish phases often labeled Presidential/Wartime Reconstruction (1863-1866), Radical/Congressional Reconstruction (1867-1871ish), and Redemption, the violent rollback of Reconstruction-era gains by white Southern Democrats that closed the era by 1877.