Reconstruction Dbq

In 1860, the southern states decided to secede from the North, South Carolina was the first, followed by Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas, constituting Confederate States of America. Thus causing the beginning of the American Civil War. The country was now divided into two, north and south and considering that north was stronger economically the south had no choice but to surrender.
However, the consequences of the war were terrible and the south was completely devastated. But Lincoln wanted a peaceful reconciliation with the South and was about to change the situation of African-Americans. We find ourselves with three very important facts: Slavery was abolished, African Americans became US citizens, and African Americans gained the right to vote.

Lincoln's plan was to reinstate the southern states without imposing excessive retaliation, although Congress demanded greater severity.

President Andrew Johnson initially maintained a posture similar to that of Lincoln. Congress passed in 1867 Laws Reconstruction, for which most of the South was divided into five military districts, the right to vote is guaranteed the male population black, and former Confederate political leaders were forbidden to take part in the governments of the various states. The policy adopted by successive governments in this period of Reconstruction caused great resentment in the South. Southerners were unable accepting any form of government in which blacks and Northern delegates have an important role and tried to alter federal government’s outbreaks of violence and, through intimidation, orchestrated mainly by the Ku Klux Klan.
By 1872 the federal government had suppressed the Klan, but white Democrats were using violence and fear to regain control of their state governments. Reconstruction ended in 1877, when in all southern states new constitutions and federal troops were withdrawn entirely from the region were

ratified.
By the late nineteenth century, this system of segregation and oppression of blacks became more rigid. For Plessy v Ferguson, aired in 1869, the US Supreme Court ruled that the Constitution allowed and separate toilet facilities for both races if such facilities were equal. Without further delay, the legislatures of the states of southern blacks allocated separate facilities, but uneven. The laws put in place a strict segregation in public transportation, theaters, and sports and even in elevators and cemeteries. The most blacks and many poor whites lost their right to vote because they did not have enough money to pay the taxes that had been enacted to exclude them from political participation, and who could not read or write. Blacks who were charged with misdemeanors were sentenced to forced labor and were sometimes beset by violent mobs. Most Southern blacks, because of poverty and ignorance, were tilling the land as tenant farmers. Although they were legally free, lived and were treated like slaves.