According to Downs and Masur, "Reconstruction began when the first US soldiers arrived in slaveholding territory, and enslaved people escaped". Soon afterwards, early discourse and experimentation began regarding Reconstruction policies.
Reconstruction, the period (1865–77) after the American Civil War during which attempts were made to redress the inequities of slavery and its political, social, and economic legacy and to solve the problems arising from the readmission to the Union of the 11 states that had seceded.
Reconstruction (1865-1877), the turbulent era following the Civil War, was the effort to reintegrate southern states from the Confederacy and 4 million newly freed people into the United States.
Reconstruction - Civil War End, Changes & Act of 1867 | HISTORY
In the twelve years after the Civil War—the era of Reconstruction—there were massive changes in American culture, economy, and politics. These were the years of the "Old West," of cowboys, Indians, and buffalo hunts, of cattle drives, railroads, and ranches.
As Du Bois famously wrote in Black Reconstruction in America (1935), this was a time in which “the slave went free; stood for a brief moment in the sun; and then moved back again toward slavery.”
The Reconstruction era (1861 to 1900), the historic period in which the United States grappled with the question of how to integrate millions of newly freed African Americans into social, political, and labor systems, was a time of significant transformation within the United States.
The Reconstruction era is commonly dated from 1865 to 1877, a tumultuous period in American history after the Civil War that ended with the withdrawal of federal troops from the southern states in 1877.