defining Itself
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A Nation Redefining Itself
The Civil War ended in April 1865. But a harder question remained unanswered: who counted as a citizen, and what rights came with that status?
The North and the South didn't agree. They never really would.
Just two days after Appomattox, Lincoln floated the idea of voting rights for Black veterans and "very intelligent" Black men. Days later, he was dead, assassinated by John Wilkes Booth on Good Friday. Andrew Johnson, a Southern Unionist who despised the planter class but held deeply conservative views on race, took the oath of office and inherited the crisis.https://www.britannica.com/biography/Andrew-Johnson
For freed people, the first order of business wasn't politics. It was family.
Enslaved families had been torn apart for generations, and 1865 brought a wave of newspaper ads and long walks back to the last place a loved one had been seen. It's hard to overstate how much of freedom's early meaning was simply the right to reunite.
Land promised another kind of freedom. General Oliver Howard's Freedmen's Bureau controlled hundreds of thousands of acres of former Confederate land, and briefly offered freed families https://www.archives.gov/research/african-americans/freedmens-bureau 40-acre plots with an option to buy. Johnson reversed that policy by September, ordering the land handed back to pardoned Confederates.
What followed was brutal. Black Codes https://www.history.com/articles/black-codes spread across the South, criminalizing unemployment and forcing labor contracts. The Ku Klux Klan formed (KKK)https://www.history.com/articles/ku-klux-klan in 1866, targeting Black landowners and families who dared send their children to school. The Memphis riots https://www.facinghistory.org/resource-library/lucy-tibbs that same year left 46 Black residents dead and every Black church and school in the city burned.
Congress pushed back. The 14th Amendment https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/14th-amendment established birthright citizenship, and by 1867, military reconstruction required Southern states to guarantee Black male suffrage. Voting rights among Black men jumped from under 1 percent to over 80 percent almost overnight.
These three years may be among the most hopeful, momentous, and frightening in American history. In less than a decade, people who had been enslaved rose to the highest levels of political life. That's a remarkable story, and one still worth telling.https://www.britannica.com/event/Presidential-Reconstruction
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