The dozen years after the American Civil War, 1865 to 1877, when the United States tried for the first time to build a genuine multiracial democracy on the ruins of slavery — writing Black freedom and citizenship into the Constitution, electing Black men to office across the South, and then abandoning the experiment to a campaign of white terror that would take a century to undo.
For a few years after the Civil War, Black men voted across the American South, sat in state legislatures, and sent representatives to Congress. Four million people who had been property the day before were now citizens building schools, churches, and families. Then armed white men took it back by murder, and the federal government let them. Reconstruction is the name for that brief experiment and its violent overthrow — long taught as a corrupt failure, now widely understood as a democratic revolution that was real, that worked, and that was crushed.