The Civil War saved the Union but shook the nation to its roots. As Americans attempted to reunite their shattered nation, they faced many difficult questions. For example, should the slaveholding Southerners be punished or forgiven? What rights should be granted to the freed African Americans? How could the war-torn nation be brought back together?

The war had left the South with enormous problems. Most of the major fighting had taken place in the South. Towns and cities were in ruin, plantations had been burned, and roads, bridges, and railroads destroyed. More than 258,000 Confederate soldiers had died in the war, and illness and wounds weakened thousands more. Many Southern families faced the task of rebuilding their lives with few resources and without the help of adult males. People in all parts of the nation agreed that the devastated Southern economy and society needed rebuilding. They disagreed bitterly, however, over how to accomplish this. This period of rebuilding is called Reconstruction. This term also refers to the various plans for accomplishing the rebuilding.

President Lincoln offered the first plan for accepting the Southern states back into the Union. In December 1863, during the Civil War, the president announced what came to be known as the Ten Percent Plan. When 10 percent of the voters of a state took an oath of loyalty to the Union, the state could form a new government and adopt a new constitution—a constitution banning slavery. Lincoln wanted to encourage Southerners who supported the Union to take charge of the state governments. He believed that punishing the South would serve no useful purpose and would only delay healing the torn nation.

The president offered amnesty, a pardon, to all white Southerners, except Confederate leaders, who were willing to swear loyalty to the Union. Lincoln also supported granting the right to vote to African Americans who were educated or had served in the Union army. However, he would not force the Southern states to give rights held by white Americans to African Americans. In 1864, three states that the Union army occupied—Louisiana, Arkansas, and Tennessee—established governments under Lincoln’s plan. These states then became caught in a struggle between the president and Congress when Congress refused to seat the states’ representatives.

A group of Republicans in Congress considered Lincoln’s plan too mild. They argued that Congress, not the president, should control Reconstruction policy. Because these Republicans favored a tougher and more radical, or extreme, approach to Reconstruction, they were called Radical Republicans. Controlled by the Radical Republicans, Congress voted to deny seats to representatives from any state reconstructed under Lincoln’s plan. Then Congress began to create its own plan.

In July 1864, Congress passed the Wade-Davis Bill. The bill offered a plan much harsher than Lincoln’s. First, a majority of white males in a state had to swear loyalty to the Union. Second, a state constitutional convention could be held, but only white males who swore they had never taken up arms against the Union could vote for delegates to this convention. Former Confederates were also denied the right to hold public office. Finally, the convention had to adopt a new state constitution that abolished slavery. Only then could a state be readmitted to the Union. Lincoln refused to sign the bill into law. He wanted to encourage the formation of new state governments so that order could be restored quickly. Lincoln realized that he would have to compromise with the Radical Republicans.

More progress was made on the other great issue of Reconstruction—helping African Americans freed from slavery. In March 1865, during the final weeks of the war, Congress and the president established a new government agency to help former enslaved persons, or freedmen. Called the Freedmen’s Bureau, this agency was actually part of the war department. In the years following the war, the Freedmen’s Bureau played an important role in helping African Americans make the transition to freedom. The agency distributed food and clothing, and also provided medical services that lowered the death rate among freed men and women.

The Freedmen’s Bureau achieved one of its greatest successes in the area of education. The bureau established schools, staffed mostly by teachers from the North. It also gave aid to new African American institutions of higher learning, such as Atlanta University, Howard University, and Fisk University. The bureau helped freed people acquire land that had been abandoned by owners or seized by Union armies. It offered African Americans free transportation to the countryside where laborers were needed, and it helped them obtain fair wages. Although its main goal was to aid African Americans, the bureau also helped Southerners who had supported the Union.

A terrible event soon threw the debates over Reconstruction into confusion. On the evening of April 14, 1865, President and Mrs. Lincoln attended the play Our American Cousin at Ford’s Theater in Washington, D.C. It was just five days after the surrender of Lee’s army and four years to the day after the fall of Fort Sumter. As the Lincolns watched the play from a private box in the balcony, John Wilkes Booth, an actor and Confederate sympathizer, entered the box without anyone seeing him. Booth shot the president in the back of the head, then leaped to the stage and escaped during the chaos that followed the shooting. Aides carried the wounded president to the nearby house of William Petersen, a tailor. Lincoln died there a few hours later, without ever regaining consciousness.

After escaping from Ford’s Theater, Booth fled on horseback to Virginia. Union troops tracked him down and on April 26 cornered him in a barn near Port Royal, Virginia. When Booth refused to surrender, he was shot to death. Booth was part of a small group that plotted to kill high officials of the United States government. A military court convicted eight people of taking part in the plot. Four were hanged and the others imprisoned for life. News of Lincoln’s assassination shocked the nation. African Americans mourned the death of the man who had helped them win their freedom. Northern whites grieved for the leader who had saved the Union.