Radical Republicans in Congress disagreed, however, and in the years ahead would put forth their own plan of Reconstruction By 1866, Johnson announced the end of Reconstruction.

Though President Johnson declared Reconstruction complete less than a year after the Confederate surrender, members of Congress disagreed. President Lincoln worked to reach his goal of reunifying the nation quickly and proposed a lenient plan to reintegrate the Confederate states.

Reconstruction — the twelve-year period after the Civil War in which the rebel Southern states were integrated back into the Union. Radical Republicans — northern Republicans who contested Lincoln’s treatment of Confederate states and proposed harsher punishments. carpetbagger — a term used for northerners working in the South during Reconstruction; it implied that these were opportunists who came south for economic or political gain. Compromise of 1877 — the agreement between Republicans and Democrats, after the contested election of 1876, in which Rutherford B. Hayes was awarded the presidency in exchange for withdrawing the….