Editing Reconstruction era (section)

=== Abolition of slavery and social reform ===
The Civil War had immense social implications for the United States. Emancipation had altered the legal status of 3.5 million persons, threatened the end of the plantation economy of the South, and provoked questions regarding the legal and social inequality of the races in the United States. The end of the war was accompanied by a large migration of newly freed people to the cities,{{sfnp|Jones|2010|p=72}} where they were relegated to the lowest paying jobs, such as unskilled and service labor. Men worked as rail workers, rolling and lumber mills workers, and hotel workers. Black women were largely confined to domestic work employed as cooks, maids, and child nurses, or in hotels and laundries. The large population of slave artisans during the prewar period did not translate into a large number of free artisans during Reconstruction.{{sfnp|Hunter|1997|pp=21–73}} The dislocations had a severe negative impact on the Black population, with a large amount of sickness and death.{{sfnp|Downs|2012|p=41}}

During the war, Lincoln experimented with [[land reform]] by giving land to African-Americans in [[History of South Carolina#Reconstruction era (1865–1877)|South Carolina]]. Having lost their enormous investment in slaves, [[planter class|plantation owners]] had minimal capital to pay freedmen workers to bring in crops. As a result, a system of [[sharecropping]] was developed, in which landowners broke up large [[plantations in the American South|plantations]] and rented small lots to the freedmen and their families. Thus, the main structure of the Southern economy changed from an elite minority of landed gentry slaveholders into a [[tenant farming]] agriculture system.<ref name=":2">{{cite journal|first1=Claudia D.|last1=Goldin|authorlink1=Claudia Goldin|first2=Frank D.|last2=Lewis|date=June 1975|url=https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/2662305/Goldin_EconomicCost.pdf|title=The economic cost of the American Civil War: Estimates and implications|journal=[[The Journal of Economic History]]|publisher=[[Cambridge University Press]]|location=Cambridge, England|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190412050216/https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/2662305/Goldin_EconomicCost.pdf|archive-date=April 12, 2019|volume=35|issue=2|pages=299–326|doi=10.1017/S0022050700075070 |jstor=2119410|s2cid=18760067 }}</ref>

Historian [[David W. Blight]] identified three visions of the social implications of Reconstruction:<ref>{{cite book |last=Blight |first=David W. |url=https://archive.org/details/racereunion00davi |title=Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory |publisher=Belknap Press of Harvard University Press |year=2001 |isbn=9780674022096 |location=Cambridge, Mass. |author-link=David W. Blight |url-access=registration}}</ref>{{Page needed|date=February 2024}}
* the ''reconciliationist'' vision, which focused on coping with the death and devastation the war had brought;
* the ''[[white supremacist]]'' vision, which demanded strict segregation of the races and the preservation of political and cultural domination of Blacks by Whites, opposed any right to vote by Blacks, and accepted intimidation and violence; and
* the ''[[emancipationist]]'' vision, which emphasized full freedom, citizenship, male [[suffrage]], and constitutional equality for [[African Americans]].