- The Civil War was, President Lincoln proclaimed, a test of whether this nation or any nation " conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal could long endure."
- Slavery was one of the primary practices being tested
- Recognized that the war was also to determine the power relationship between the federal and state governments and the nature and control of the economy
- The Eleventh National Women's Right Convention in May 1866
- In March 1867 the Republican dominated Congress passed the Reconstruction Act, which struck down many of those restrictive codes that targeted African Americans
- Reconstruction began even before the end of the Civil War, when numerous volunteers established refugee centers, hospitals, schools, and other social services
- Ended in the late 1870s, with the withdrawal from the South of federal forces and the passing by the reunited states of laws designed to limit African Americans socially, politically, and economically
- Jim Crow laws legalized racial segregation in virtually every area of life
- The last part of the 19th century and the first few years of the twentieth became known in African American history as "the Nadir of Black Experience."
- In 1883, the Supreme Court outlawed the Civil Rights Act of 1875 by upholding the Jim Crow laws of Tennessee
- Freedman's Bureau) agency established by Congress in March 1865 to provide social, educational and economical services, advice, and protection to former slaves and destitue whites; lasted seven years
- Black Codes) laws passed by states and municipalities denying many rights of citizenship to free black people before the Civil War
- In the spring of 1866, Congress passed two important bills designed to aid African Americans. The landmark Civil Rights bill (Act) bestowed full citizenship to African Americans, overturning the 1857 Dred Scott decision and the Black Codes
- Congress also voted to enlarge the scope of the Freedman's Bureau, empowering it to build schools and pay teachers and also to establish courts to prosecute those charged with depriving African Americans of their civil rights
- (Reconstruction Act) 1867 act passed by Congress that divided the South into five military districts subject to martial law
- (15th Amendment) passed by Congress in 1869, guaranteed the right of American men to vote, regardless of racial background
- Throughout the summer and fall of 1865, observers in the South noted enormous numbers of freed people on the move
- Many blacks who left their old neighborhoods and homes returned soon afterward to seek work in the general vicinity, or return to the same plantation on which they lived to become sharecroppers.