Who do you think killed Reconstruction? The South or the North? This is a very controversial topic since both the North and the South’s actions impacted the progression of Reconstruction. The Reconstruction Act took place after the Civil War. It was the rebuilding of the United States after what was left of the Civil War. Reconstruction was a time in America consisting of many leaders, goals and accomplishments. Though, like most things in life, it came to an end, the result was both a success and a failure. The South killed Reconstruction. They weren’t interested in equal rights and they showed much violence towards the North and African-Americans. An example of how the South wasn’t interested in equal rights was when they created laws called …show more content…
An example of the KKK using violence was “John W. Stephens, State Senator from Caswell, is dead. He was foully murdered by the Ku-Klux in the Grand Jury room of the Courthouse.” This was making a big impact on Reconstruction because the KKK was killing anybody that supported Reconstruction. Another piece of evidence of the KKK killing reconstruction was, “[the Klansmen] broke my door open, took me out of bed, took me to the woods and whipped me three hours or more and left me for dead. They said to me, “Do you think you will ever vote another damned Radical ticket?” “They said I had voted for Grant and had carried the Negroes against them. About two days before they whipped me they offered me $5,000 to go with them and they said they would pay me $2,500 in cash if I would let another man to go the legislature in my place.” This negatively impacted reconstruction because the KKK were killing and bribing anybody who voted the Radical Ticket. Overall, there’s plenty of reasons the KKK put a negative impact on the Reconstruction of the …show more content…
“Although political violence continued in the South…the tide of public opinion in the North began to turn against Reconstruction policies.” Some may think this meant the North was killing Reconstruction but the North can’t help the South if they’re going to keep rebelling and trying to take over. They can’t help people who don’t want to be helped. “In the fall of 1873, even the staunchly [firmly] pro-Grant and pro-freedman Boston Evening Transcript ran a letter…arguing that “the blacks, as a people, are unfitted for the proper exercise of political duties.” In the North’s defense, this was kind of true, since most blacks were uneducated and the Black Codes prevented them from many rights which were needed as politicians. Like the right of assembly. My thesis is correct. Though the North did have some actions that may have impacted Reconstruction in a negative way, most of them were for a reason and made sense. The South killed Reconstruction. They weren’t interested in equal rights and they showed much violence towards the North and African-Americans. In conclusion, my thesis is correct because there’s various pieces of evidence I provided that show how the South is to be blamed for killing Reconstruction. Even though the North started to give up on the South, it’s not their fault that the South wasn’t showing any effort and didn’t want to be
Although it wasn’t the main reason reason Reconstruction ended, northern neglect was still a significant problem. “...in the 1870s, Northern voters grew indifferent to events in the South. Weary of the ‘Negro question and ‘sick of carpet-bag’ government, many Northern voters shifted their attention to such national concerns as the Panic of 1873 and corruption in Grant’s administration….” (Harper’s weekly Doc C) If we want to know as much information as possible about how the North lost interest in Reconstruction we must understand the
scalawags. They all worked together to plan new state governments. Reconstruction died because of two main causes, the south tried to stop it and the north gave in.
The North had a very different opinion of the American way and made it exceedingly clear with the formation of numerous abolition societies, effectively abolishing slavery across the northern region and allowing blacks to live as productive members society, rather than its the property. Even one of the most prominent slave holders of that time was forced to rethink the legitimacy of slavery. “Seeing free black soldiers in action undermined [George] Washington’s racial prejudice and ultimately his support for slavery itself” (Finkelman 18). The productivity, societal and political benefits, and military empowerment made available by freed slaves challenged the South’s sense of racial supremacy, thus they began to establish a defense against the complete abolition of
Imagine a historian, author of an award-winning dissertation and several books. He is an experienced lecturer and respected scholar; he is at the forefront of his field. His research methodology sets the bar for other academicians. He is so highly esteemed, in fact, that an article he has prepared is to be presented to and discussed by the United States’ oldest and largest society of professional historians. These are precisely the circumstances in which Ulrich B. Phillips wrote his 1928 essay, “The Central Theme of Southern History.” In this treatise he set forth a thesis which on its face is not revolutionary: that the cause behind which the South stood unified was not slavery, as such, but white supremacy. Over the course of fourteen elegantly written pages, Phillips advances his thesis with evidence from a variety of primary sources gleaned from his years of research. All of his reasoning and experience add weight to his distillation of Southern history into this one fairly simple idea, an idea so deceptively simple that it invites further study.
The Reconstruction was the process of trying to rebuild the South after the devastating effect of the Civil War. Some interesting facts during the Civil War were first, in 1869 the first college football game took place, second, African American universities became a reality, and last, in 1870, Hiram Revels was elected the first black Senator. In the end, Reconstruction died, but we’ve all been asking the same thing; North or South: Who killed the Reconstruction? Answering this question, I believe the North killed the Reconstruction by a lack of focus on it, the racism on African Americans, and being sick of assisting the South.
The South won in Reconstruction in many ways. Rebuilding the South was one of its major focuses. Several canals, bridges, and railroads were rebuilt with Reconstruction funds. The Republicans in Congress agreed with southern legislatures on how important business was. For this, a large amount of money was gathered to help the South’s reconstruction. Even though slavery was abolished with the passing of the 13th Amendment, it still existed in the South in the forms of “Black Codes” and cults like the Ku Klux Klan. In conclusion, Lincoln won the war for the North, but President Johnson won Reconstruction for the South by allowing them to create their own laws to keep the former slaves down and keeping their Southern lifestyles.
In conclusion, Reconstruction failed for the freedmen for a variety of reasons. I believe the main reason for this failure was the inability for the two political parties to agree on what they wanted to achieve. Did they want total freedom for the freed slaves, only partial freedom, or just the rebuilding that issue coupled with unpopularity, the freedman’s culture being rooted in the south, and the freed slaves’ inability to find work outside of the south resulted in a process that took over a century to work successfully. I feel that it is very unfortunate that President Lincoln was killed so shortly after the end of the Civil War. I believe that since Reconstruction was Lincoln’s idea he would have carried it out more successfully than his successors did.
After the great battle of the American Civil War was fought, and the North won, a bigger battle still had to take place; reconstruction. Reconstruction after the war was not going to be easy, and it was not. What was the primary goal? What should be done to ex-confederates? Free Blacks? How should this reconstruction take place? Many of these questions were solved by the government, but how well? Reconstruction could have gone very differently, and that is what I intend to show. I will develop my own reconstruction policy for the United States after the American Civil War, dealing with several critical points, and the overall re-integration of the south into the Union. My policy is based on equality for the South and North, and making sure that a political balance and a balance of economic power was restored as much as possible.
The social history regarding reconstruction has been of great controversy for the last two decades in America. Several wars that occurred in America made reconstruction efforts to lag behind. Fundamental shortcomings of the reconstruction were based on racism, politics, capitalism and social relations. The philosophy was dominant by the people of South under the leadership of Lincoln. Lincoln plans were projected towards bringing the states from the South together as one nation. However, the efforts of the Activist were faded by the intrusion of the Republicans from the North. Northerners were capitalists and disapproved the ideas that Lincoln attempted to spread in the South (Foner Par 2).
In the first few years of the Reconstruction, violent acts against the former slaves took place primarily in the south. In 1866, about one year after the civil war, the most well renowned terrorist group of the time, the Klu Klux Klan, took shape in Tennessee. In 1866, the Civil Rights Bill was proposed in Congress. At the time, it was referred to as, “one of the most important bills ever presented to the House for its action.”
America has gone through many hardships and struggles since coming together as a nation involving war and changes in the political system. Many highly regarded leaders in America have come bestowing their own ideas and foundation to provide a better life for “Americans”, but no other war or political change is more infamous than the civil war and reconstruction. Reconstruction started in 1865 and ended in 1877 and still to date one of the most debated issues in American history on whether reconstruction was a failure or success as well as a contest over the memory, meaning, and ending of the war. According to, “Major Problems in American History” David W. Blight of Yale University and Steven Hahn of the University of Pennsylvania take different stances on the meaning of reconstruction, and what caused its demise. David W. Blight argues that reconstruction was a conflict between two solely significant, but incompatible objectives that “vied” for attention both reconciliation and emancipation. On the other hand Steven Hahn argues that former slaves and confederates were willing and prepared to fight for what they believed in “reflecting a long tradition of southern violence that had previously undergirded slavery” Hahn also believes that reconstruction ended when the North grew tired of the 16 year freedom conflict. Although many people are unsure, Hahn’s arguments presents a more favorable appeal from support from his argument oppose to Blight. The inevitable end of reconstruction was the North pulling federal troops from the south allowing white rule to reign again and proving time travel exist as freed Africans in the south again had their civil, political, and economical position oppressed.
One reason the North killed Reconstruction was because they were racist. Freedmen politicians were portrayed as corrupt “fat cats” and caused nothing but chaos and bedlam in the legislatures they served in (Harper’s Weekly, 1874). This showed that the North thought negatively about African Americans. Also, the Boston Evening Transcript stated that, “blacks need a [period of probation and instruction; a period…long enough for the black to have forgotten something about his condition as a slave and learned much of the true method of gaining honorable subsistence and of performing the duties of any position to which he might aspire,” (Richardson, 2001). This quote proved that the North was not ready to fully embrace African Americans as equals, and that there was still some racism that existed among Northerners. So, if the North was not racist, the North may have been more positive Reconstruction, and, in turn, spend more time working on Reconstruction.
... and slavery left millions of newly freed African Americans in the South without an education, a home, or a job. Before reconstruction was put in place, African Americans in the South were left roaming helplessly and hopelessly. During the reconstruction period, the African Americans’ situation did not get much better. Although helped by the government, African Americans were faced with a new problem. African Americans in the South were now being terrorized and violently discriminated by nativist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan. Such groups formed in backlash to Reconstruction and canceled out all the positive factors of Reconstruction. At last, after the Compromise of 1877, the military was taken out of the South and all of the Reconstruction’s efforts were basically for nothing. African Americans in the South were back to the conditions they started with.
The Civil war could very easily be known as one of the greatest tragedies in United States history. After the Civil War, the people of The United States had so much anger and hatred towards each other and the government that 11 Southern states seceded from the Nation and parted into two pieces. The Nation split into either the Northern abolitionist or the Southern planation farmers. The Reconstruction era was meant to be exactly how the name announces it to be. It was a time for the United States to fix the broken pieces the war had caused allowing the country to mend together and unite once again. The point of Reconstruction was to establish unity between the states and to also create and protect the civil rights of the former slaves. Although Reconstruction failed in many aspects such as the upraise in white supremacy and racism, the reconstruction era was a time the United States took a lead in the direction of race equality.
With the end of the Civil war in 1865, the new nation of the United States now faced challenges on restoring peace within the Union. The North, having won the civil war, now faced the task to implement reconstruction of the South. They came in contact with the questions of: What should happen to the freed slaves, should the freed slaves have rights, what should be done to the Confederate leaders, and how should the South be reconstructed? There were many different ideas and views on how Reconstruction should be handled, but only one succeeded more successfully than the other. Although they bear some superficial similarities, the difference between presidential and congressional reconstruction are clear. The president believed that Confederate