End of Reconstruction

On 27 January 1870 a Richmond newspaper reported that "President Grant yesterday signed the bill admitting Virginia to representation in Congress, and now it only remains for us to organize our own Government to be once more a State governed, at least at home, by men of its own choice." This signified the end of Reconstruction in Virginia, a period in which Congress required each of the former Confederate states to meet certain conditions before its population could regain full citizenship rights.

A majority of Civil War battles occurred on Virginia soil, leaving a path of destruction throughout the state. Homes and farmland were lost—so, too, was the economic system of slavery. Along with this devastation, thousands of young Virginia men died or were disabled in the war. Credited with helping Virginians, and all southerners, face the process of reconciliation, Confederate general Robert E. Lee's advice was to "abandon all these local animosities and make your sons Americans." Francis H. Pierpont became provisional governor after the surrender at Appomattox, and although he hailed from what was now West Virginia and had expressed pro-Union sentiments throughout the war, he worked to provide postwar Virginians with needed relief from the destruction that had blanketed the land.

When the General Assembly met in 1866, legislators rejected the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, despite pleas from Governor Pierpont. This amendment, known together with the Thirteenth and Fifteenth as the Reconstruction Amendments, provided ex-slaves with rights as citizens. Nine other southern states voted the amendment down. As a result, Republicans in Congress passed more vigorous requirements for former Confederate states to regain representation in Washington. For example, they divided the South into five military districts, and Congress demanded that each state hold a new constitutional convention and pass the Fourteenth Amendment.

The Virginia constitutional convention, held in Richmond from December 1867 to April 1868, consisted of seventy-three Radical Republicans and thirty-two Conservatives. The result, the Underwood Constitution, granted freedmen the right to vote, but also disfranchised many ex-Confederates. Conservatives agreed to support the new document if the portion concerning ex-Confederates was voted on separately. The Underwood Constitution passed in an 1869 referendum. The General Assembly, by then in the hands of Conservatives and Moderate Republicans, passed the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments, thus meeting all conditions for Virginia's complete acceptance back into the Union. The state was readmitted on January 26, 1870.