Reconstruction Dbq

The Civil War fragmented the United States by not only state borders, but by ideals and beliefs such as how much power the federal and state governments should hold, slavery, and other key issues at the time. By the end of the war, the Union had the responsibility to bring the former states of the Confederacy back into the union, rebuild both their economies and state governments, and address the large population of newly freed slaves. From period of 1865 to 1877, the period of Reconstruction in the south was only furthered slowed by resistance from portions of white population in the south who wished for their way of life to remain the same as their where before the war. During the years of Reconstruction, the whites’ resistance slowly began

to devolve from peaceful political defiance to all out terrorism and bloodshed.
Among the first of the issues addressed by the Union during Reconstruction having the southern states rejoin the Union and elect new leaders and representatives and address the new laws passed by the federal government. After Abraham Lincoln’s assassination the new president, Andrew Johnson, was very liberal with his policies for allowing the south the rejoin the Union and as a result whites in the south took this opportunity to elect former Confederacy leaders where elected into offices in both southern states and Congress such as putting former confederate vice president Alexander Stephens in the Senate to represent Georgia.

Through the power of elections, the whites of the south thought that they could maintain their way of life and further combat the changes the Union attempt to place on them if they could reclaim their former political influence. In 1865 Congress, in order protect the freed slaves in the south from discrimination and violence passed the Thirteenth Amendment that officially abolished slavery and created the Freedmen’s Bureau that would directly support the blacks of the south. States like Mississippi adapted Black Codes which created laws and regulations, for example stated that if they are caught without employment or gathering in large groups they will be “fined in a sum not exceeding…fifty dollars,” meant to limit both the freedoms and movement of the blacks (450). By restricting the freedoms and movement of the black population in the south, the whites where able to legally mimic slavery for

a time and easily support their heavily agriculturally focused economy. In the years follow the Federal government passed several bills which included the Fourteenth Amendment, giving all blacks citizenship, and separated the south into 5 military districts in order to stop the wide spread violence the began to spring up all over the south and allow for the black male population to help elect proper leadership. Despite these efforts the southern whites still questioned the legitimacy of the reconstructions. With their legal efforts stopped time and time again, portions of the white community shifted their efforts to violence and terrorism thus the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan was founded in late 1865 and rounded up smaller white militias and organizations that were already using violence to suppress reconstruction efforts. By 1871, the Klan were attacking voting polls, black churches and any place of gathering for blacks and republican supports; killing hundreds of blacks, white republican supporters, and office holders that supported Reconstruction. A victim of one of these such attacks stated that the Klan members “committed rape upon me” as they ravaged her residence looking for a suspected Republican supporter. The Klan’s random acts of terrorism were only stopped by the late 1870s when the federal government captured and arrested over 600 of their members. By the end of Reconstruction in their years following, white resistance in the south subsided as the country’s focus shifted from the south to the west.
During the time of Reconstruction, the whites of the south shifted from civilized men that acted within the realm of the law to resist the changes to accustomed lift style to angry beasts that attacked anything and everything the did not agree with them. Violence and terrorism was the end result that did not provide them the old pre-civil war environment they wanted.