Reconstruction lasted from 1865 to 1877, those were the years when the US began to rebuild after the Civil War, also refers to the process the federal govt. used to readmit the defeated Confederate states to the Union. Complicating the process was the fact that Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Johnson, and the members of Congress all had diff. Ideas about how Reconstruction should be handled.
Lincoln made it clear before his death that he was in favor of a lenient Reconstruction policy. Decembe