Reconstruction Era

December 8, 1863 – March 31, 1877

After the Union won the Civil War, it faced the difficult task of reintegrating both emancipated slaves and rebellious states. The South was divided into five military districts subject to the US army to keep ex-Confederates in line. During this time, the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments were passed, making slavery illegal, granting citizenship to former slaves, and giving black men the right to vote. 

Despite these victories, a combination of economic hardship and resistance from southern whites eventually led to the end of Reconstruction with the Compromise of 1877. This unwritten agreement placed control of the South in the hands of the Democrats in return for recognition of the Republican nominee as the winner of the 1876 presidential election. The Southern Democrats worked around the new amendments to enforce segregation and impose new political and economic restrictions on African Americans. These restrictions marked the beginning of the Jim Crow Era, which did not end until 1965, and whose effects we still feel today. 

While Reconstruction was happening in the US, Mexico was fighting a civil war of its own. After liberal president Benito Juárez suspended the repayment of Mexico’s debt to France, French Emperor Napoleon III created a plan to reinstall the monarchy with Mexican Conservatives. In 1864, the younger brother of Kaiser Franz Joseph and a potential heir to the Habsburg throne, Ferdinand Maximilian, became puppet emperor of Mexico. However, the United States saw this as a violation of the Monroe Doctrine - a policy forbidding Europe from intervening in the Americas. With the end of the Civil War in 1865, the US began aiding Juárez, and by 1867 his forces captured and executed Maximilian I. Together with the series of deaths and assassinations of other Habsburg heirs in the following years, the death of Maximilian marked the beginning of the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.