Political Aspects

One of the most controversial periods in American history was Reconstruction,

which followed the Civil War. Traditionally portrayed as a sordid time when
vindictive Radical Republicans fastened black supremacy upon the defeated
Confederacy, Reconstruction has come to be viewed more sympathetically, as a
laudable if unsuccessful experiment in interracial democracy.

In America's political life, reconstruction has been marked by vast changes. The
federal system and the character of American citizenship are permanently altered
at the national level by new laws and constitutional amendments. In the South, a
politically mobilized black community joined with white allies to bring the
Republican Party to power and to define the purpose and responsibilities of the
government.

The first comprehensive plan for reconstruction, the Ten Percent Plan, was
announced by President Abraham Lincoln in December of that year. This offered a
pardon to all southerners, except Confederate leaders, who took an oath of
firming loyalty to the Union and support for emancipation. They could form a new
government if 10 percent of the voters in their country took such an oath.

Although one of the new governments was established or has been recognized by
Congress, it has achieved widespread local and national support. Lincoln's plan
has been condemned by many Republicans as inadequate. The Wade Davis Act,
which opposed the postponement of the creation of a new Southern government
until the majority of voters had taken the oath of loyalty, was enacted by Congress
in 1864.

Much of the northern presidency's resistance to rebuilding has been turned on its
head by the policies taken by the new Southern governments. The northern
Republicans were even more alarmed by the "rebels" apparent rise and at the
Black Laws enacted by southern legislators. These laws required blacks to sign
yearly labor contracts, declared unemployed blacks vagrants who could be hired
out to white landowners, provided for the apprenticing of black children to white
employers without the consent of their former owners, and in other ways sought
to limit the freedmen's economic options and re-establish plantation discipline.
When Congress assembled in December 1865 radical republicans like Thaddeus
Stevens and Charles Sumner called for the abrogation of the Johnson government
and the establishment of new ones based on equality before the law and
manhood suffrage. Congress refused to seat the congressmen and senators
elected from the southern states and in early 1866 passed and sent to Johnson
The Freedmen's Bureau and civil rights bill.

Congress proposed that the Federal government guarantee the principle of

equality before the law regardless of race against state violation. Johnson's
rejection of the bills was based on a combination of personal stubbornness, strong
belief in state rights, and deep racial convictions. The President and Congress have
been at loggerheads ever since he vetoed them. The Civil Rights Act was the first
major piece of legislation in American history to become law over a president's
veto.

Shortly thereafter, Congress approved the Fourteenth Amendment, which forbade

states from depriving any citizen of the "equal protection of the from holding state
or national office and threatened to reduce the South's representation in Congress
if black men continued to be kept from voting. Not until 1867, however, was
Congress prepared to endorse black suffrage directly.

Congress now decided to begin Reconstruction anew The Reconstruction Acts of

1867 divided the South into five military districts and outlined how new
governments, based on manhood suffrage, were to be established. The period of
radical and congressional remaking has begun.

Carpetbaggers, or recent arrivals from the North, were former Union soldiers,
teachers, Freedmen's Bureau agents, and businessmen, most of whom had come
south before 1867 when the possibility of obtaining office was remote. But
they've jumped at the chance to help shape the "backward" South in the image of
the North.

The second large group of Republicans- scalawags, or native-born white

Republicans included some Old Whig planters who hoped to lead a "harnessed
revolution" in which whites would recognize blacks' civil and political rights but
retain control of state government.
Republicans Ulysses S. Grand was elected president that was soon afterward
Congress approved the Fifth Amendment preventing States from restarting the
franchise because of Race then it started a series of enforcement acts authorizing
national action to suppress political violence in 1871 the administration launched
a legal and military offensive the destroyed The Klan.

Economic and social aspects

The Civil War and the post-war period of reconstruction have, for all Americans,
significantly altered our economy and social structure. As Allan Nevins observed
over fifty years ago, the period with need was the "emergence of modern
America." In the victorious North and West, the completion of the national railway
network, the establishment of the modern steel industry, the settlement of the
Trans Mississippi West, the final subduing of the Plains Indians, and the expansion
of the mining frontier, have taken place in these years.

As a result of the abolition of slavery, South America's social and economic

transformation was more extensive than its northern counterpart.

Under slavery, most blacks had lived in nuclear family units, although they faced
the constant threat of separation from loved ones by sale. Reconstruction has
given black people the opportunity to reinforce family ties. Freed people made
remarkable efforts to locate loved ones from whom they had been separated
under slavery, and many black women, preferring to devote more time to their
families, refused to work any longer in the cotton fields.

At the same time, blacks withdrew almost entirely from white-controlled religious
institutions. Consequently, there was a contradiction in the quality of relations
between races during Reconstruction. There was division in society, as both races
moved away from their institutions.

To blacks, economic autonomy rested on ownership of land. Many freedmen in

1865 and 1866 fused to sign labor contracts, expecting the federal government to
provide them with farms of their own, to which their past labor they believed
entitled them. As the Alabama overseer has reported, in certain areas. They "set
up President Andrew Johnson in the summer of 1865 and Ordered land in federal
hands to be returned to its former owners.
Most blacks are compelled to go to work as laborers on whites on farms and
plantations. Fixed payment instead of work for wages. New employment systems
have emerged in the various Southern regions as a result of the conflict with
farms. The southern cotton belt has been dominated by sharecropping.

As railroads penetrated the interior, they enabled merchants in rapidly developing

markets, such as Atlanta, to trade directly with the north, bypassing the coastal
cities that had traditionally dominated southern commerce. A new bourgeoisie,
composed of merchants, railroad promoters, and bankers, has emerged in the
highlands. The class didn't have a lot of influence on the national economy.