Civil War Reconstruction Research Paper

The Northern victory in the Civil War in 1865 gave 4 million slaves their freedom, but the process of rebuilding the South during the Reconstruction period (1865-1877) introduced a new set of issues and the white people in the south despised of it. Under the administration of President Andrew Johnson in 1865 and 1866, new southern state legislatures passed restrictive “black codes” to control the labor and behavior of former slaves in the south. Much of the Southern United States was destroyed during the Civil war. Farms and plantations were burned down and their crops destroyed. Also, many people had Confederate money which was now worthless and the local governments were in disarray. The South needed to be rebuilt. The rebuilding of the …show more content…
Federal troops occupied much of the South during the Reconstruction to insure that laws were followed and that another uprising did not occur. Many people wanted the South to be punished for trying to leave the Union. Other people, however, wanted to forgive the South and let the healing of the nation begin. the South made it easy for southern states to rejoin the Union. He said that any southerner who took an oath to the Union would be given a pardon. He also said that if 10% of the voters in a state supported the Union, then a state could be readmitted. Under Lincoln any state that was readmitted had to make slavery illegal as part of their constitution.President Lincoln was assassinated at the end of the Civil War, however, and never had the chance to implement his Reconstruction plan. When Andrew Johnson became president, he was from the South and wanted to be even more lenient to the Confederate States than Lincoln. Congress, however, disagreed and began to pass harsher laws for the Southern states. Because of Johnson’s leniency, southern states in 1865 and 1866 successfully put in place a series of laws called black codes which were designed to restrict freed blacks’

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