Social Sciences and History / Unit 1 SSH 0039 worked example, 60 to 90 seconds
Reconstruction: Plans, Amendments, Collapse
The idea
Reconstruction ran from eighteen sixty-five to eighteen seventy-seven. Lincoln's ten percent plan offered a lenient path back. After his murder, Andrew Johnson pardoned southerners en masse and declared Reconstruction finished by eighteen sixty-six. Congress disagreed, overrode his vetoes, and imposed Radical Reconstruction under military rule from eighteen sixty-seven. Three amendments remade the Constitution. The Thirteenth abolished slavery. The Fourteenth made everyone born in the country a citizen and guaranteed equal protection of the laws. The Fifteenth barred denying the vote on account of race, giving Black men the ballot; women's suffragists were disappointed. By the end of eighteen seventy all the southern states were readmitted.
In practice
To match an amendment to a question, ask what it forbids. A question about a state denying citizenship or unequal treatment points to the Fourteenth. A question about the ballot points to the Fifteenth. A question about slavery itself points to the Thirteenth.
Where people slip
The collapse came from terror and fatigue together. The Ku Klux Klan operated as an arm of the Democratic Party, scandals and a depression weakened Republicans, and the Compromise of eighteen seventy-seven gave Hayes the presidency for withdrawing the last federal troops. The anchor judges that Reconstruction failed its primary objective, an interracial democracy with equal rights; the course reports that as the anchor's judgment.
Your place on the trail
Every lesson rests on earlier ones and opens later ones. Tap any to jump.
Something wrong in this lesson? Flag it