Chapter 22

The Ordea of Reconstruction,

1865–1877

These African Americans in Richmond, Virginia, commemorated the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1888 by paying their respects to the “Great Emancipator,” Abraham Lincoln.

Commemorating Emancipation Day

Valentine Richmond History Center

President Andrew Johnson revered the U.S. Constitution but eventually felt its awesome weight in his impeachment trial.

Crushed by the Constitution

The Granger Collection

An Inflexible President, 1866This Republican cartoon shows Johnson knocking blacks out of the Freedmen’s Bureau by his veto.

Library of Congress

Thaddeus Stevens (1792–1868)Stevens, who regarded the seceded states as “conquered provinces,” promoted much of the major Reconstruction legislation, including the Fourteenth (civil rights) Amendment. Reconstruction, he said, must “revolutionize Southern institutions, habits, and manners. . . . The foundation of their institutions . . . must be broken up and relaid, or all our blood and treasure have been spent in vain.”

Library of Congress

For many white Southerners, military Reconstruction amounted to turning the knife in the wound of defeat. An often-repeated story of later years had a Southerner remark, “I was sixteen years old before I discovered that damnyankee was two words.”

Military Reconstruction, 1867 (five districts and commanding generals)

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The exercise of democratic rights by former slaves constituted a political and social revolution in the South and was bitterly resented by whites.

Freedmen Voting, Richmond, Virginia, 1871

The Granger Collection

A composite portrait of the first black senators and representatives in the Forty-first and Forty-second Congresses. Senator Hiram Revels, on the left, was elected in 1870 to the seat that had been occupied by Jefferson Davis when the South seceded.

Black Reconstruction

The Granger Collection

The Ku Klux Klan, Tennessee, 1868This night-riding terrorist has even masked the identity of his horse.

Tennessee State Museum

The purchase of Alaska from the Russian Empire in 1867, known to many as Seward's Folly, expanded the territory of the United States by well over half a million square miles.

Alaska and the Lower Forty-eight States (a size comparison)

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