Movement of resistance · 1865–1877
Reconstruction & Black Political Power
The brief era of Black voting, officeholding, and constitutional citizenship after the Civil War.
On the timeline
- January 16, 1865Special Field Order No. 15, "40 acres"
Sherman sets aside coastal land for freed families, a promise soon revoked.
- March 3, 1865The Freedmen's Bureau
A federal agency to aid the formerly enslaved with food, schools, and labor contracts.
- April 9, 1866The Civil Rights Act of 1866
The first federal law to define citizenship and affirm equal rights regardless of race.
- March 2, 1867The Reconstruction Acts
Congress divides the South into military districts and requires new constitutions with Black male suffrage, opening the door to Black political power.
- January 14, 1868South Carolina's Black-majority convention
For the first time, a Black-majority convention (73 of 124 delegates) writes a state constitution, among the most democratic of its day.
- July 9, 1868The 14th Amendment
Citizenship and equal protection are written into the Constitution.
- February 3, 1870The 15th Amendment
The vote is guaranteed regardless of race; Black men begin electing Black officials across the South.
- February 25, 1870Hiram Revels, first Black US Senator
Revels of Mississippi becomes the first African American in the US Senate during Reconstruction.
- December 12, 1870Joseph Rainey, first Black US Representative
Rainey of South Carolina becomes the first Black member of the US House.
- April 20, 1871The Ku Klux Klan Act
Federal law empowers the government to suppress Klan terror in the South.
- March 1, 1875The Civil Rights Act of 1875
A federal ban on racial discrimination in public accommodations, later gutted by the courts.
Resources
Federal records of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands.
The museum's exhibition on Reconstruction through a Black lens.
Black political ascendancy after the war and the violent backlash that ended it.
Documents ~2,000 previously uncounted Reconstruction-era lynchings.
A digital archive of the 19th-century Black organizing conventions.
NPS overview tied to the Reconstruction Era National Historical Park.
Du Bois''s landmark revisionist history of Reconstruction and Black political agency.
Pulitzer-winning history of the 1898 white-supremacist coup in Wilmington, NC.
History of Reconstruction''s overthrow and the rise of Jim Crow.
The web
Connections to other moments, systems, and investigations, the links rarely drawn together.
- suppressed (incoming)·EventThe Compromise of 1877 ends Reconstruction
The bargain that settled the 1876 election withdrew federal troops and abandoned Reconstruction to "Redemption."
- enabled (incoming)·EventThe Reconstruction Acts
Military Reconstruction opened the brief era of Black political power.