Civil War Reconstruction Research Paper

Following the end of the Civil War, the Union came out the victor and the Confederacy the loser. Because the Confederacy lost the war, though, the Union was presented with the problem of consolidating the southern states back into the Union, a process known to historians as Reconstruction. With the goal in mind of creating a Republican presence in the south based on a Free Labor ideology, the Republican Party was only moderately successful, and their eventual failure resulted in a Democratic south as well as southern traditions, such as white supremacy, being retained. Nearing Union victory, President Abraham Lincoln proposed a solution to reincorporate the southern states back into the Union. His plan, called the ten percent plan, proposed …show more content…
However, as a result of this, Reconstruction was rather easy on southerners. President Johnson, still a Democrat, was sympathetic to southern states, and mob violence was still present in the south. One notable example of this was in Memphis and New Orleans when violence erupted between Freedman and white Unionists. The Memphis riots claimed, “forty-seven black lives, and the white mob in New Orleans killed thirty-four blacks” (Barney 247). This is important to the topic at hand because it shows how the south was able to resort to their past methods of relying on the militia/police to suppress the African-American population and white supremacy, thus, endured. Additionally, Democrats were further able to survive despite Republican attempts to create a Republican south in the Election of 1868. While U.S. Grant, the popular war general from the days of the Civil War, was successful in securing a Republican victory in the election, Democrats were able to make a strong come-back in the election, further demonstrating how Republicans had failed in their attempts to subdue the Democratic Party. This was further demonstrated with the example of passing the 15th Amendment, which secured voting rights for African-American males. Republicans rushed to quickly vote on the amendment in the 40th Congress, the Congress prior to …show more content…
This was further devastating on the south when northerners, specifically Republicans, were losing interest and neglected the needs of the poor that had elected them into office in the first place. Democrats, on the other hand, were returning to both Congress and the political offices of the south due to their slandering of the Grant administration as “inherently corrupt and [a] despotic alliance of greedy carpetbaggers, vile scalawags, and ignorant blacks” (Barney 288). Northerners further turned their backs on the south due the surge of violence produced by the Ku Klux Klan from 1870-1871. The Klan soon began to operate as a political tool of the Democrats, targeting active Republicans to freedmen through acts of violence and assassination. By 1871, southern Republicans experienced intense pressure from the Klan, and most Republicans were fearful of messing with the Klan at all, in the fear that any attempt on their part could start a race war. Despite breaking, if not destroying the Klan through the Force Acts (1870-71), white supremacy lived on through the Mississippi Plan, resulting in additional support for the Democratic Party and southern traditions. The Mississippi Plan blended “violence, fraud, and martial unity” in order to get rid of the Republican presence in the south. Under the Mississippi Plan, African-Americans

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