A photomontage of portraits of both white and African American men in suits

Reconstruction offered a glimpse of equality for Black Americans. Why did it fail?

During the Reconstruction era, the U.S. abolished slavery and guaranteed Black men the right to vote. But it was marred by tragedy and political infighting—and ended with a disastrous backlash.

Members of the first South Carolina legislature after the Civil War. Approximately 2,000 Black men were elected to office during the post-war Reconstruction period, which briefly provided political and social power to formerly enslaved people before a backlash ushered in an era of segregation.

Photograph courtesy Mercer Brown, the Library of Congress

On April 11, 1865, U.S. President Abraham Lincoln spoke to an ecstatic crowd at the White House. In the last speech he ever gave, Lincoln could have waxed poetic about Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s recent surrender and the impending end of America’s bloodiest conflict. Instead, he made a case for stitching the country back together after the Civil War by restoring rebel states to the Union and undoing the evils of slavery.

“Let us all join in doing the acts necessary to restoring the proper practical relations between [Confederate] states and the Union,” Lincoln said. “I believe it is not only possible, but in fact, easier, to do this, without deciding, or even considering, whether these states have even

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