* The American Civil War began with most of the slave-holding American states unilaterally seceding from the Union in 1861, to establish the Confederate States of America. The Union did not accept secession, and in four years of war destroyed the Confederacy, outlawing slavery in the process. The Union victory, however, left the thorny problem of the re-integration of the breakaway states into the republic, with the associated difficulty of determining what would happen to ex-slaves in the new order. It took a dozen years to politically rehabilitate the ex-Confederate states, but it was only on the basis of a segregated and oppressive "Jim Crow" society that persisted for a century. This document provides a history of the Reconstruction Era. A list of illustration credits is provided at the end.
