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The Reconstruction Era.

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THE END of the Civil War marked the close of one era in the history of the United States and the beginning of another—one which would be racked by conflict between the president and Congress and between freedmen and their former slave-masters, but one in which blacks would assume unprecedented political power and the nation would begin thrusting toward a position of great power, of extraordinary wealth.

The war had settled two questions for all time: the United States would remain an undivided nation and blacks would no longer be slaves. The South's secessionist attempt had been crushed by superior force on the battlefield. After two hundred years of bondage, blacks conld now rejoice with promises, with hope. The promises would rest forever on the national conscience ; the hope would eventually be crushed.

The immediate postwar problem was the status of the South. Were Southern states still states, despite their four-year struggle to destroy the Union? Or had they committed acts so treasonous that they had become merely territories for the federal government to readmit to the Union on certain conditions?

There was another question, an enormously important one: what would be the place of the nearly four million blacks for whom freedom had been won? It was this question and the nation's response to it that would emerge as the dominant characteristic of the Reconstruction era, the first twelve postwar years (1865-77).

In the North and in Congress there