A research on the reconstruction era in the united states

Visit Website Did you know? During Reconstruction, the Republican Party in the South represented a coalition of blacks who made up the overwhelming majority of Republican voters in the region along with "carpetbaggers" and "scalawags," as white Republicans from the North and South, respectively, were known. Emancipation changed the stakes of the Civil War, ensuring that a Union victory would mean large-scale social revolution in the South. It was still very unclear, however, what form this revolution would take.

A research on the reconstruction era in the united states

In recent decades most historians follow Foner in dating the Reconstruction of the south as starting in with Emancipation and the Port Royal experiment rather than Reconstruction policies were debated in the North when the war began, and commenced in earnest after Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamationissued on January 1, Army, President Abraham Lincoln set up reconstructed governments in TennesseeArkansasand Louisiana during the war.

He experimented by giving land to blacks in South Carolina. By fallthe new President Andrew Johnson declared the war goals of national unity and the ending of slavery achieved and reconstruction completed.


The Congressional elections turned on the issue of Reconstruction, producing a sweeping Republican victory in the North, and providing the Radical Republicans with sufficient control of Congress to override Johnson's vetoes and commence their own "Radical Reconstruction" in In ten states, [10] coalitions of freedmen, recent black and white arrivals from the North carpetbaggersand white Southerners who supported Reconstruction scalawags cooperated to form Republican biracial state governments.

They introduced various reconstruction programs including: Conservative opponents called the Republican regimes corrupt and instigated violence toward freedmen and whites who supported Reconstruction.


Klan members attacked and intimidated blacks seeking to exercise their new civil rights, as well as Republican politicians in the south favoring those civil rights. One such politician murdered by the Klan on the eve of the presidential election was Republican Congressman James M.

Widespread violence in the south led to federal intervention by President Ulysses S. Grant inwhich suppressed the Klan. Nevertheless, white Democratscalling themselves " Redeemers ", regained control of the south state by state, sometimes using fraud and violence to control state elections.

A deep national economic depression following the Panic of led to major Democratic gains in the North, the collapse of many railroad schemes in the South, and a growing sense of frustration in the North. The end of Reconstruction was a staggered process, and the period of Republican control ended at different times in different states.

With the Compromise ofmilitary intervention in Southern politics ceased and Republican control collapsed in the last three state governments in the South.

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This was followed by a period which white Southerners labeled "Redemption", during which white-dominated state legislatures enacted Jim Crow laws and, beginning indisenfranchised most blacks and many poor whites through a combination of constitutional amendments and electoral laws.

The white Democratic Southerners' memory of Reconstruction played a major role in imposing the system of white supremacy and second-class citizenship for blacks using laws known as Jim Crow laws.

Intense controversy erupted throughout the South over these issues. By the s, Reconstruction had officially provided freedmen with equal rights under the constitution, and blacks were voting and taking political office. Republican legislatures, coalitions of whites and blacks, established the first public school systems and numerous charitable institutions in the South.

White paramilitary organizationsespecially the Ku Klux Klan and also the White League and Red Shirts formed with the political aim of driving out the Republicans.

They also disrupted political organizing and terrorized blacks to bar them from the polls. From toconservative whites calling themselves " Redeemers " regained power in the Southern states. They joined the Bourbon wing of the national Democratic Party. In the s and s the terms "radical" and "conservative" had distinctive meanings.

Leaders who had been Whigs were committed to economic modernization, built around railroads, factories, banks and cities. Passage of the 13th14thand 15th Amendments is the constitutional legacy of Reconstruction. These Reconstruction Amendments established the rights that led to Supreme Court rulings in the midth century that struck down school segregation.

A "Second Reconstruction", sparked by the Civil Rights Movementled to civil rights laws in and that ended segregation and re-opened the polls to blacks.The Reconstruction era was the period from to in American barnweddingvt.com term has two applications: the first applies to the complete history of the entire country from to following the American Civil War; the second, to the attempted transformation of the 11 ex-Confederate states from to , as directed by Congress.



The reconstruction era can be defined from two perspectives. First, it covers the story of the United States between the periods of to The second part revolved around the transformation of the United States in to . Reconstruction refers to the period immediately after the Civil War from to when several United States administrations sought to reconstruct society in the former Confederate states in particular by establishing and protecting the legal rights of the newly freed black population.

A research on the reconstruction era in the united states

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An Essay Sample On US History: The Reconstruction Era