Reconstruction and the 13th Amendment
A Murder Reshapes Reconstruction
On the evening of 14 April 1865 — five days after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox — John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre in Washington. Lincoln died the next morning. Reconstruction, the project of rebuilding the defeated South and integrating around 4 million formerly enslaved people into American life, suddenly fell to Vice President Andrew Johnson, a Tennessee Democrat with very different priorities to Lincoln. The next twelve years would see remarkable legal gains for Black Americans — and an equally remarkable rolling back.
The three Reconstruction Amendments transformed the US Constitution. The 13th (1865) abolished slavery; the 14th (1868) granted citizenship and equal protection to all people born in the US; the 15th (1870) banned the denial of voting rights on grounds of race. Together they redefined American citizenship.
Presidential Reconstruction, 1865–1866
Andrew Johnson believed the Southern states should rejoin the Union quickly and on lenient terms. His Presidential Reconstruction allowed each former Confederate state to write a new constitution, ratify the 13th Amendment and rejoin Congress with little intrusion. By the end of 1865 the 13th Amendment had been ratified and slavery was officially over — a constitutional revolution that fulfilled Lincoln’s war aim.
Within months, however, Southern state legislatures — many filled with former Confederates — passed laws known as Black Codes. These restricted formerly enslaved people’s ability to move, change jobs, own property in towns or testify in court against white men. Mississippi’s Code required Black workers to sign yearly labour contracts; vagrancy laws criminalised joblessness, allowing courts to lease Black defendants to white employers. Northerners watched the South recreating slavery under another name.
The 1866 Civil Rights Act and the Freedmen’s Bureau
Congress responded. The 1866 Civil Rights Act — passed over Johnson’s veto — declared that all persons born in the United States were citizens, with equal rights to make contracts, sue, give evidence and own property. It was the first federal civil rights law in US history. Alongside it, the Freedmen’s Bureau, established in March 1865 and renewed in 1866, distributed 21 million rations, founded around 4,000 schools, and supervised labour contracts and court cases for newly emancipated Southerners.
The 1866 mid-term elections gave Republicans a two-thirds majority in Congress, allowing them to override Johnson’s vetoes at will. The 1867 Reconstruction Acts divided the South into five military districts, suspended the existing state governments, and required new state constitutions guaranteeing Black male suffrage before any state could rejoin the Union. Federally appointed military governors enforced the law. Johnson’s attempts to obstruct led to his impeachment in 1868 — he survived removal from office by a single Senate vote.
Black Political Participation
Under Radical Reconstruction, Black Americans entered politics on a scale never seen before. Around 2,000 African Americans were elected to public office between 1867 and 1877, including 16 to the US Congress and around 600 to state legislatures. Hiram Revels became the first Black US Senator in 1870, taking the seat once held by Jefferson Davis. Frederick Douglass, the most prominent Black abolitionist, advocated tirelessly for Black suffrage and was eventually appointed US Marshal for Washington DC.
Reconstruction state governments expanded public education, building thousands of new schools (often the first in their districts for either race), invested in hospitals and railroads, and rewrote tax codes to fund the new spending. Many of these reforms outlasted Reconstruction and reshaped the South for generations.
Reform was real, but partial. The promise of ‘forty acres and a mule’ — redistributed land from former plantations — was rescinded by Johnson in 1865. Most freedpeople ended up as sharecroppers, working land owned by former slaveholders for a share of the crop. Debt and crop failure trapped many in poverty for the rest of their lives. Voting rights existed in law but were already being undermined by white-supremacist violence and intimidation by the late 1860s. Federal will was strong in 1867 but began ebbing within a decade.
From ‘Tragic Era’ to ‘Unfinished Revolution’
For most of the early 20th century, US textbooks called Reconstruction ‘the tragic era’ — a story of Northern occupation, corrupt government and victimised white Southerners. From the 1960s onwards historians, especially Eric Foner in his 1988 study Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, reframed the period as a genuinely radical experiment in multiracial democracy that achieved real reforms before being broken by terror and federal retreat. This reframing is now the mainstream view.
By 1870 Reconstruction had abolished slavery, granted citizenship and Black male suffrage, founded around 4,000 schools, and elected the first Black US Senator. But it had also failed to redistribute land, allowed Black Codes to be replaced by sharecropping, and was already meeting violent resistance from groups such as the Ku Klux Klan.