Reasons For Reconstruction

Reconstruction is during which the United States began to rebuild the Southern society after they lost to the civil war. It lasted from 1865 to 1877, and it was initiated by President Lincoln until his assassination in 1865. President Johnson continued Lincoln’s agenda to continue the Reconstruction. Throughout the process of Reconstruction, one of its main purpose was to guarantees for equal rights for all people, especially for the African Americans. Even though slavery was abolished after the civil war, many Southerners were still against the idea of equal rights for all black people, such as the Republicans.

Nicholas Lemann begins his book “Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War” with the 1873 Colfax, Louisiana massacre where a White League militia comprised of former Confederate soldiers killed black Republican voters. The Colfax massacre was perhaps the bloodiest event of Reconstruction. Lemann views this event as a startup of what would happen later in Mississippi if Federal troops did not defend black voters. Lemann blames Ulysses S. Grant’s Secretary of War, William W. Belknap, for not stopping the White Line activity in Louisiana and Mississippi. Grant had worked hard to stop the Ku Klux Klan in the early 1870s with Congress passing legislation and Federal troops putting down Klan activity.

Even though the Ku Klux Klan did stop many freedmen from voting, a few still got through in order to vote

The beginning of the Reconstructionist era was the perfect time for the KKK to attack the black community and Republicans politically, eventually leading to social structure and economy becoming targets as well. The South may have lost the Civil War and the slaves may have been emancipated, but the Klan wasn’t going to let history forget the Confederate movement. But their main goal extended further than the Confederate movement’s, which was to preserve the Southern way of life and the institution of slavery. Since they had lost all this and more, the Klan’s main objective was to maintain white

The Reconstruction was unsuccessfull because of some important reasons. First, the South was still aracist part of the United States because they created the Jim Crow Laws, what means that the people who lived and administratedthe South were not intelligent. The second example is that Abraham Lincoln, who started and incentivated the Reconstruction, was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth, so it made the Reconstruction process to be less efective. Finally, the last problem was the Solid South, it is a name that the South recieved because it was a solid white, solid racist and solid Democrat, what means that they were not able to support black people. Concluding, all of these examples shows why the Reconstruction was unsuccessfull

Andrew Costly discusses the Southern “Black Codes” of 1865-1866 that came after the Civil War ended slavery in America. Costly discusses how Congress created the Freedman’s Bureau that tried to help to make sure former slaves were being treated and paid well by their employers. Costly also discusses the South Carolina Black Code and how it only applied to “persons of color”; the codes included labor contracts, civil rights, vagrancy, and other restrictions. Andrew Costly tells about the how the northern protesting the Black Codes because they felt as if

The South killed reconstruction because the KKK was murdering people, they were creating fear everywhere in the South, and because of racism. A reason that the South killed reconstruction was because the KKK was murdering people. The KKK began to murder government officials and supporters of reconstruction. “He was foully murdered by the Ku-Klux in the Grand Jury room on Saturday.”

As a result of this, racist organizations were founded to wreaked havoc on former slaves. Secret societies in the southern united states, such as the Ku Klux Klan and the Knights of the White Camellia used violence against the blacks. Their goal was often to keep blacks out of politics. Our textbook states, “In other states, where blacks were a majority or where the populations of the two races were almost equal, whites used outright intimidation and violence to undermine the Reconstruction regimes” (Brinkley 368). The people involved in such organizations were using violence to take away the fifteenth amendment right from the former slaves.

While the legislation of the radical Republicans brought much-needed measures of radical equality to America, their enforcement of such measures came at a time when the South was already looking for reasons to resent the Union, and the military action certainly didn't help the concept of remaining on good terms. Corruption under these regimes were rampant as well, in which radical government schemers took advantage of the money provided for new public programs and used it to pad their own wallets. The Ku Klux Klan began because of the backlash from the hastily-passed 15th Amendment and would proceed to beat, threaten, and murder blacks and Republicans alike, creating an atmosphere of fear and a movement that would persist until the 1920s. In the end, the results of Congress's actions served to alienate Republicanism in the South, and the good they attempted to do for freed blacks was ultimately undermined by Southern voting stipulations, governmental corruption, and a Northern disinterest in the plight of African Americans. Lincoln's plan never saw fruition and never had the chance to evolve as necessary; only the bare ideas were in place, and written before the war was even over.

The KKK was a group that killed or terrorized any african american or republican, for the sheer fact that they were either not white or not democrat, or both. The impact itself on southerners made them results to even much more violent and chaotic ways than

At the end of the Civil War between the North and South arose the Reconstruction era. This was a time period of the late 1800s where the united states, specifically the North started to attempt the rebuilding of the South. Abolitionists were eager to see the end of slavery and Lincoln attempted to end slavery. President Lincoln attempted to put in place the Emancipation Proclamation which stated all slaves in confederate states would be free. This was to weaken the southern states; except, the confederate states did not obey.

From 1868 through the early 1870s the Ku Klux Klan functioned as a loosely organized group of political and social terrorists. The Klan’s goals included the political defeat of the Republican Party and the maintenance of absolute white supremacy in response to newly gained civil and political rights by Southern blacks after the Civil War. At first it was formed as a social club for Confederate soldiers after the war, but it soon progressed to be one of the biggest terror groups in American history. Most Klan action was designed to intimidate black voters and white

Former slaves who “tried to vote or participate in politics [were] likely to be singled out for “punishment”” by a terrorist organization named as the Ku Klux Klan, until the Congress passed the Force Bill in 1871 that gave the federal authorities the right to arrest and pursue active members of the KKK. But, the bill appeared to be only figurative as not really much of the Klan’s members were prosecuted (Hazen

One of the most used tactics by Klan, mainly the Reconstruction Klan, was fear. The Reconstruction Klan had a realization that in trying to be mysterious they gained the ability to "control the ignorant and superstitious African Americans and southern politicians from the north (1). So, groups of Klansmen in robes and other out of the ordinary costumes would visit African Americans and politicians whom they viewed as defiant (2). They would then proceed to use scare tactics in the form of "supernatural" events that played off the beliefs of dissenters' to keep people subdued (2).

Frederickson argues African Americans simply did not have the time or preparation to oppose racist forces. Using paramilitary forces, southern redeemers easily made threats to reconstruction forces as seen through the emergence of the violent Ku Klux Klan during the election of 1866. The opportunity for African Americans to gain a stance in society was short lived by the racist efforts of democrats in the south and impartial ideals from