In many cases, the United States Army played a vital role in establishing a free labor economy in the South, protecting freedmen's legal rights, and creating educational and religious institutions.

Johnson vetoed numerous Radical Republican bills, he pardoned thousands of Confederate leaders, and he allowed Southern states to pass draconian Black Codes that restricted the rights of freedmen.

[5] The Reconstruction era has typically been dated from the end of the American Civil War in 1865 until the withdrawal of the final remaining federal troops stationed in the Southern United States in 1877, though a few other periodization schemes have also been proposed by historians.

According to historians Downs and Masur, "Reconstruction began when the first US soldiers arrived in slaveholding territory, and enslaved people escaped from plantations and farms, some of them fleeing into free states, and others trying to find safety with US forces."

The Reconstruction policies provided opportunities to enslaved Gullah populations in the Sea Islands who became free overnight on November 7, 1861, after the Battle of Port Royal when all the white residents and slaveholders fled the area after the arrival of the Union.

[13] Heather Cox Richardson argued that same year for a periodization from 1865 until 1920, when the election of Warren G. Harding to the presidency marked the end of a national sentiment in favor of using government power to promote equality.

[23] Historian David W. Blight identified three visions of the social implications of Reconstruction:[24][page needed] The Civil War had a devastating economic and material impact on the South, where most combat occurred.

[citation needed] By 1866, the faction of Radical Republicans led by Representative Thaddeus Stevens and Senator Charles Sumner was convinced that Johnson's Southern appointees were disloyal to the Union, hostile to loyal Unionists, and enemies of the Freedmen.

Congress temporarily suspended the ability to vote of approximately 10,000 to 15,000 former Confederate officials and senior officers, while constitutional amendments gave full citizenship to all African Americans, and suffrage to the adult men.

[citation needed] President Lincoln signed two Confiscation Acts into law, the first on August 6, 1861, and the second on July 17, 1862, safeguarding fugitive slaves who crossed from the Confederacy across Union lines and giving them indirect emancipation if their masters continued insurrection against the United States.

Lincoln immediately ordered Frémont to rescind his emancipation declaration, stating: "I think there is great danger that ... the liberating slaves of traitorous owners, will alarm our Southern Union friends, and turn them against us—perhaps ruin our fair prospect for Kentucky."

On March 26, 1862, Lincoln met with Senator Charles Sumner and recommended that a special joint session of Congress be convened to discuss giving financial aid to any border states who initiated a gradual emancipation plan.

Frederick Douglass, a prominent 19th-century American civil rights activist, criticized Lincoln by stating that he was "showing all his inconsistencies, his pride of race and blood, his contempt for Negroes and his canting hypocrisy".

Lincoln pocket vetoed the bill and the rift widened between the moderates, primarily concerned with preserving the Union and winning the war, and the Radicals, who wanted to effect a more complete change within Southern society.

In the words of Benjamin Franklin Perry, President Johnson's choice as the provisional governor of South Carolina: "First, the Negro is to be invested with all political power, and then the antagonism of interest between capital and labor is to work out the result.

However, because they lacked capital and the planters continued to own the means of production (tools, draft animals, and land), the freedmen were forced into producing cash crops (mainly cotton) for the land-owners and merchants, and they entered into a crop-lien system.

The bewildered and terrified freedmen know not what to do—to leave is death; to remain is to suffer the increased burden imposed upon them by the cruel taskmaster, whose only interest is their labor, wrung from them by every device an inhuman ingenuity can devise; hence the lash and murder is resorted to intimidate those whom fear of an awful death alone cause to remain, while patrols, Negro dogs and spies, disguised as Yankees, keep constant guard over these unfortunate people.Much of the violence that was perpetrated against African Americans was shaped by gender prejudices regarding African Americans.

[104][page needed] The South's judicial system had been wholly refigured to make one of its primary purposes the coercion of African Americans to comply with the social customs and labor demands of whites.

The purpose of this bill is to destroy all these discriminations.The key to the bill was the opening section:[This quote needs a citation] All persons born in the United States ... are hereby declared to be citizens of the United States; and such citizens of every race and color, without regard to any previous condition of slavery ... shall have the same right in every State ... to make and enforce contracts, to sue, be parties, and give evidence, to inherit, purchase, lease, sell, hold, and convey real and personal property, and to full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings for the security of person and property, as is enjoyed by white citizens, and shall be subject to like punishment, pains, and penalties and to none other, any law, statute, ordinance, regulation, or custom to the Contrary notwithstanding.The bill did not give freedmen the right to vote.

[145][146] Republicans sought to make inroads campaigning for the Irish taken prisoner in the Fenian raids into Canada, and calling on the Johnson administration to recognize a lawful state of war between Ireland and England.

[161] Immediately upon inauguration in 1869, Grant bolstered Reconstruction by prodding Congress to readmit Virginia, Mississippi, and Texas into the Union, while ensuring their state constitutions protected every citizen's voting rights.

[170][171][172] Grant was so adamant about the passage of the Ku Klux Klan Act, he earlier had sent a message to Congress, on March 23, 1871, in which he said: "A condition of affairs now exists in some of the States of the Union rendering life and property insecure, and the carrying of the mails and the collection of the revenue dangerous.

[203] The Methodist Ministers Association of Boston, meeting two weeks after Lincoln's assassination, called for a hard line against the Confederate leadership:[204][205] Resolved, that no terms should be made with traitors, no compromise with rebels.... That we hold the national authority bound by the most solemn obligation to God and man to bring all the civil and military leaders of the rebellion to trial by due course of law, and when they are clearly convicted, to execute them.The denominations all sent missionaries, teachers and activists to the South to help the freedmen.

In one Florida store with a largely Black clientele, the items most often purchased were corn, salt pork, sugar, lard, coffee, syrup, rice, flour, cloth, shoes, shotguns, shells, and patent medicines.

"[247] Historians have noted that the peak of lynchings took place near the turn of the century, decades after Reconstruction ended, as Whites were imposing Jim Crow laws and passing new state constitutions that disenfranchised the Blacks.

It brought 5,000 troops to New Orleans to engage and overwhelm forces of the metropolitan police and state militia to turn Republican Governor William P. Kellogg out of office and seat John McEnery.

Several Hayes supporters, on the other hand, argued that the President pro tempore of the Senate had the authority to determine which certificates to count, because he was responsible for chairing the congressional session at which the electoral votes were to be tallied.

Further in the same book, he wrote: "Moderates, Liberals, and Democrats continued to deplore Southern conditions until the Northern business man was persuaded that only a restoration of native white government would bring the peace necessary for economic penetration into the South.

Contemporary scholars, including Hannah Rosen, have challenged these interpretations by emphasizing the era's transformative potential and highlighting the efforts of freedmen and their allies to establish civil rights and social equality.

Many other authors romanticized the supposed benevolence of slavery and the elite world of the antebellum plantations, in memoirs and histories which were published in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; the United Daughters of the Confederacy promoted influential works which were written in these genres by women.