Reconstruction on the Schoolhouse Wall: A Timeline, 1865–1877

Freedom, Rights and a Promise Broken

1When the Civil War ended in April 1865, about 4 million people who had been enslaved were free, but the meaning of their freedom was not settled. Freedpeople searched for family members who had been sold away, built churches and, above all, wanted land and schooling. The Freedmen's Bureau, a federal agency, helped open more than 1,000 schools, and Black communities often raised money and built schoolhouses themselves. Many Black adults sat in classrooms beside children to learn to read.

2The 13th Amendment ended slavery throughout the United States, except as a punishment for a crime. President Andrew Johnson, who took office after Lincoln was killed, wanted to bring the Southern states back quickly. Under his plan, many Southern legislatures passed Black Codes, laws that limited where freedpeople could work, travel and own land. Many members of Congress, especially the Radical Republicans, believed Johnson's plan threw away what the war had won.

3Congress took control of Reconstruction. It passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866 over Johnson's veto, and then the 14th Amendment, which made people born in the United States citizens and promised all persons "the equal protection of the laws." The Reconstruction Acts of 1867 divided most of the former Confederacy into military districts and required those states to write new constitutions that let Black men vote. The 15th Amendment then barred states from denying the vote because of "race, color, or previous condition of servitude."

4During these years, Black men voted in large numbers, and historians have counted more than 1,500 Black men who held public office, from local sheriff to the U.S. Congress. In 1870 Hiram Revels of Mississippi became the first Black U.S. senator. New state governments, made up of Black and white Republicans, created the South's first public school systems open to all children, though the schools were usually separate.

5These gains met fierce resistance. Many white Southerners saw the new governments as forced on them by the North, and groups such as the Ku Klux Klan used threats and violence to keep Black citizens from voting. Over time many Northerners lost interest in the South, especially after the Panic of 1873 turned attention to hard times at home. Supreme Court decisions in the 1870s narrowed how the federal government could protect rights. The election of 1876 between Rutherford B. Hayes and Samuel Tilden was disputed. In the Compromise of 1877, Democrats accepted Hayes as President, and the last federal troops were withdrawn from Southern statehouses. Within a few decades, Southern states found ways to block most Black men from voting, and the promises of the 14th and 15th Amendments went largely unenforced for decades.