Reconstruction
The Union won the Civil War in 1865 it might have given 4 million slaves their freedom, but the process of fixing the destruction to the South during the Reconstruction period (1865-1877) introduced a new set of challenges. Under the control of President Andrew Johnson in 1865 and 1866, new southern state legislatures passed the restrictive "black codes" to control the labor and behavior of slaves and other African Americans. Anger in the North over these codes got rid of support for the approach known as Presidential Reconstruction. During Radical Reconstruction, which began in 1867, newly enslaved blacks gained a voice in government for the first time in American history, winning election to southern state legislatures and even to the U.S. Congress. In less than a decade, however, some forces–including the Ku Klux Klan–would reverse the changes wrought by Radical Reconstruction in a violent backlash that restored white supremacy in the South.