Reorganization (1865-1877), the turbulent period after the Civil War, was an attempt to reunite the southern states from unification and to reunite 4 million newly-released slaves in the United States. In 1865 and 1866, under the administration of President Andrew Johnson, the new state legislature in the South passed a “black code” restricting the labor and behavior of ex-slaves and other African Americans. Many historians have long portrayed it as a time when liberal radical Republicans consolidated black supremacy against a defeated Confederacy, with restructuring seen more sympathetically as an admirable test of interdependent democracy since the late twentieth century. The reorganization abolished the remnants of Confederate isolation and slavery and made newly freed slaves entitled to civil rights and was guaranteed by three new constitutional amendments. The restructuring also refers to the attempt to transform the 11 former Confederate states in the south as directed by Congress and the role of the Union States in that transformation.
After the assassination of Lincoln in April 1865, Andrew Johnson became President and inaugurated the Presidential Reconstruction Period (1865-67). Johnson offered to pardon all Southern whites except Confederate leaders and wealthy planters (although most of them were later pardoned), restoring their political rights and all property except slaves. With the passage of the Radical Reconstruction Act of 1867, the newly deprived blacks gained a voice in government for the first time in American history, with the Southern State Legislature even winning elections in the United States Congress. In less than a decade, however, reactionary forces, including the Ku Klux Klan, will counteract radical reconstruction in a violent response to restore white dominance in the South. Elected in 1868, Republican President Ulysses S. Grant supported a congressional reorganization and enforced the protection of South American Americans through the Enforcement Act passed by Congress. Grant Ku Klux used the Enforcement Act to deal with the Klan, which was largely wiped out, although the Klan’s new incarnation finally regained national fame in the 1920s. Southern blacks won elections to southern state governments and even the U.S. Congress during this period. Other achievements of the restructuring included the first state-funded public school system in the South, more equitable tax laws, laws against caste discrimination in public transport and housing, and ambitious economic development programs. Ex-slaves of every age took the opportunity to sign. Grandparents and their grandchildren sat together in the classroom trying to find the tools of freedom.
Public support for restructuring policies, requiring continued oversight by the South, faded in the north with the rise of the Liberal Republicans in 1872 and regained control of the House of Representatives in 1874 after Democrats opposed to restructuring. Yet, while openly violating the Reconstruction Amendments to the Constitution, Charles Sumner called for them to be awakened by the next generation who wanted to return the promise of true freedom to the descendants of slavery in the sleeping civil rights movement, until 1960, sometimes. ” Known as the “Second Restructuring”, the country will again seek to meet the political and social agenda of restructuring. In 1877, as part of a Congressional bargain to elect Republican Rutherford B. Hayes as president after the disputed 1876 presidential election, the U.S. military was withdrawn from three states (South Carolina, Louisiana, and Florida) where they still remain. This marked the end of the restructuring.
