The process of rebuilding after the American Civil War is known as The Reconstruction. The Civil War left America with many stressful questions over what to do with the South after the crush of the Confederacy and the ending of slavery. Although these questions uprooted during the Civil War and continued for decades, the Reconstruction lasted from the end of the Civil War, 1865, to 1877. .
Reconstruction emerges in the early part of the war. Union commanders and the federal government were forced to make decisions about how large areas of the South gained by Union forces should be administered. Decisions were first made for islands off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia, for southern Louisiana, for northern Virginia, and then for much more of the South. Northern missionaries arrived to set up schools for blacks in the South. Former slaves were employed as contract labor, and local whites loyal to the Union organized new state governments under federal control. From the time of that Emancipation Proclamation was issued, Northern aim shifted from preserving the Union to rebuilding the South. .
Later in the Civil War, several plans were projected for the political organization of states captured. A proposal that enjoyed considerable support among Radicals was the Wade-Davis bill, which was created by Senator Wade and Representative Henry Winter Davis of Maryland. It required one-half of a state's white male citizens to swear loyalty to the Constitution before a new state government could be formed. Another plan was President Lincoln's Ten Percent Plan, which allowed a government to be based on the faithfulness of one-tenth of the white males. The following were the only three Southern states accepted the Ten Percent Plan: Tennessee, Arkansas, and Louisiana. Unwilling and argumentative Radical Republicans refused to allow them to enter Congress.
April 15, 1865, President Lincoln was assassinated.
