![]() The term "Federal Reconstruction" (sometimes called "Radical Reconstruction") refers to the period between 18, when the federal government officially occupied the South and national policy focused on enforcing new civil rights and legal protections for black citizens in the former Confederate states. The project of rebuilding a fractured nation began in the wake of these legal redefinitions of who was to be considered a citizen. In the immediate aftermath of the war, the Fourteenth Amendment (1868) granted citizenship rights to black Americans and the Fifteenth (1870) guaranteed suffrage to all male U.S. ![]() ![]() The Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution prohibited slavery in 1865 and freed close to 4 million people of African descent from chattel slavery, where they had been denied all rights of citizenship and prevented by law from learning to read and write. Not surprisingly, there was intense political conflict over the terms under which Reconstruction would proceed in the region, and at times violent conflict erupted over who would define those terms. Reconstruction called on the energies of the entire nation but was most contested within the radically redefined legal and social relationships of the American South. When the Civil War ended, the United States faced the challenge of reconstructing a newly expanded civil democracy amid the rubble of war. Until well into the twentieth century, literary artists, scholars, orators, and journalists grappled with the legacies of slavery and war within the uniquely American dynamics of race and democracy. The Reconstruction era following the end of the American Civil War in 1865, like any postwar period, was a turbulent historical context for the production of a national literature.
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