Reconstruction era

The Reconstruction era was the period after the American Civil War, from 1865 to 1877, in which the United States reintegrated the defeated Southern states and tried to secure the rights of some four million freed people. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments abolished slavery, guaranteed citizenship and equal protection of the laws, and forbade denying the vote on grounds of race, and Black men were elected to office across the South. Violent resistance by groups such as the Ku Klux Klan and the waning will of the North brought it to an end with the withdrawal of federal troops in 1877, after which Southern states imposed segregation and disenfranchisement.