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Reconstruction was the attempt from 1865 to 1877 in U.S. history to resolve the issues of the American Civil War, when both the Confederacy and slavery were destroyed. Reconstruction addressed the return to the Union of the secessionist Southern states, the status of the leaders of the Confederacy, and the Constitutional and legal status of the Negro Freedmen. Violent controversy erupted over how to tackle those issues, and by the late 1870s Reconstruction had failed to equally integrate the Freedmen into the legal, political, economic and social system. "Reconstruction" is also the common name for the entire history of the era 1865 to 1877.