Reconstruction — The Unfinished Revolution

CHAPTER 11 · 1865–1877 · The American Civil War, 1861–1865

Teach the achievements first, because a century of mythology taught only the grievances. In five years the Constitution is remade: the Thirteenth Amendment abolishes slavery (December 1865 — the map’s final snapshot); the Fourteenth (1868) writes birthright citizenship and “equal protection of the laws”; the Fifteenth (1870) bars racial tests for the vote. Under their shelter, and the army’s, freedpeople build at revolutionary speed: legal marriages by the tens of thousands, families reunited by newspaper advertisement, Black churches and schools everywhere (the Freedmen’s Bureau plus Northern

The turn: Colfax, Easter Sunday 1873.

This chapter is one scene of an interactive atlas: the map repaints as the dates advance, campaigns draw themselves, and every chapter argues its causes and consequences — then a field exam asks you to prove it on the map.