The Ordeal Of Reconstruction
...means, was wounded the most from the war. Reconstruction lasted from 1865 to 1877 and was one of the most controversial periods in the nation's history. The victory of the North in the Civil War put an end to slavery and stopped the South's effort to secede from the Union. This also marked the beginning of rebuilding the South. There would be about four million freed slaves, most of them homeless, poor, and illiterate during the era of Reconstruction.
The Presidential Reconstruction was a complicated situation because of the assassination of Lincoln on April 14, 1865. It moved Vice President Andrew Johnson into the presidency, who made sure that he did not have the same priority as the Republicans to remake the South.1 He believed that secession was a conspiracy of slaveholding aristocrats against the interests of ordinary Southerners. For that reason, Johnson created the Reconstruction plans. It sought after pardons granted to those taking a loyalty oath, no pardons be available to high Confederate officials and persons owning property valued in excess of $20,000, a state needing to abolish slavery before being readmitted, and a state requirement to repeal its secession ordinance before being readmitted.2 His plans did not offer blacks a role in the development of Reconstruction. Therefore, the Southern states had to determine where their place would be. In the same year, Johnson adopted Lincoln's lenient "10 percent plan" for Southern Reconstruction, but made significant changes to it. While changing the number 10 to 50 percent requirement for states to rejoin the Union when they take the oath of loyalty to the Union,
1. Reconstruction (U.S. history), "Presidential Reconstruction."
2. Collier and Lincoln Collier, Reconstruction and the Rise of Jim Crow, 21
2
he also required the states to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution which would...
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