RECONSTITUTION, THE, the process by which Carolina, the Indies, and the southern Chesapeake were restored to their full seats in the Assembly and the Senate following the Instrument of Reunion of the 9th of August 1843, a process generally reckoned to have run its course by 1858 with the passage of the Freedmen's Charter (q.v.). It stands, in the judgment of this contributor and of most who have written on the subject since, among the Commonwealth's better achievements: a rebellious province restored to full civic standing within a generation, its people readmitted to the franchise, its courts reopened under judges of the Commonwealth's own appointment, and its economy given every reasonable assistance in the transition from a labour system the Act of General Emancipation (q.v.) had already ended in principle and the Severance (q.v.) had ended, at whatever cost, in fact.
The new provincial constitutions drafted under the Commonwealth's supervision between 1844 and 1852 extended the franchise, on their face, to every adult man regardless of his former condition, and the provincial assemblies elected under those constitutions in the eighteen-fifties returned, for the first time in the Commonwealth's history, a considerable number of freedmen members — a fact the Commonwealth was, and remains, justly proud to record. The Freedmen's College of New Carthage, founded in 1867 with the Commonwealth's own endowment, is perhaps the most durable single monument of the reconstructive impulse, and its graduates have since supplied Carolina and the Indies with a professional and clerical class that the plantation economy of 1836 could scarcely have imagined.
It would be pleasant to record that the settlement so achieved has proved as durable as it was generous, and this article will content itself with observing that provincial administration in matters of franchise and registration has, in the decades since, developed a good deal of local variety, the particulars of which belong more properly to the provincial articles themselves than to a general account of the Reconstitution's design. The design was sound; that a design remains sound in the drafting is not always a guarantee of what forty years of provincial practice will make of it, and the present writer is content to leave that observation where an encyclopaedia article on institutions, rather than on their later administration, properly leaves it. (E. H. V.)