During Reconstruction, Congress created the Freedmen's Bureau in 1865 to provide food, schools and legal help to freed people. It passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the three Reconstruction Amendments. Black men voted in large numbers, and more than 1,500 Black men held public office, from local posts to the US Senate. Hiram Revels of Mississippi became the first Black senator in 1870.
White Southerners fought back through Black Codes and through terror by groups such as the Ku Klux Klan. The Compromise of 1877 settled a disputed presidential election and led to the withdrawal of federal troops. Southern states then stripped Black people of the vote and built Jim Crow.
For decades, historians described Reconstruction as a corrupt failure, a view shaped by the Lost Cause. W. E. B. Du Bois challenged that in Black Reconstruction in America in 1935. Historians now see the era as an early experiment in multiracial democracy that was ended by violence.