The Civil War and Reconstruction, 1861-1877

The War, 1861-1865:

The Civil War was the bloodiest conflict in American history: approximately 620,000 soldiers died (more than in all other American wars combined up to that point), and millions more were wounded. The industrial North eventually overwhelmed the agrarian South through sheer weight of numbers, factories, and railroads.

Two documents transformed the war's meaning. At Gettysburg in November 1863, Lincoln's Gettysburg Address reframed the war as a fight for human equality — "that all men are created equal." Two months earlier, the Emancipation Proclamation (1 January 1863) had declared enslaved people in Confederate states free, transforming the war from a conflict over Union into a war against slavery. In April 1865, Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox Court House. Lincoln was assassinated five days later.

Reconstruction, 1865-1877:

The Reconstruction era attempted to integrate 4 million formerly enslaved people into American society as free citizens. Three constitutional amendments transformed the legal landscape:

• 13th Amendment (1865): Abolished slavery throughout the United States
• 14th Amendment (1868): Granted citizenship to all people born in the US (including formerly enslaved people)
• 15th Amendment (1870): Prohibited denying the vote based on race, colour, or previous servitude

For a brief period, Black men voted, held office, and built institutions across the South. But white supremacist resistance was ferocious. The Ku Klux Klan, founded in 1865, used terror — lynching, arson, murder — to prevent Black political participation. When federal troops withdrew from the South in 1877 (the Compromise of 1877), Reconstruction effectively ended. Black Codes and then Jim Crow laws systematically stripped away the rights the amendments had granted.