First Stage Of Reconstruction Essay

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Pages: 3

Although the end of the Civil War in 1865 marked the liberation of over 4 million slaves, American society still faced many obstacles in becoming a truly free country for freedmen. The process of integrating blacks into white society and granting them deserved civil rights, known as Reconstruction, consisted of two main phases. In May of 1865, President Johnson enacted the first stage of Reconstruction, in which he returned all the property of ex-Confederates who agreed to support the 13th amendment and unionism, and prescribed steps for the southern states to reestablish state governments. Radical Republicans were angered by the lenience of Presidential Reconstruction; very few ex-Confederate leaders were persecuted, beatings of African Americans …show more content…
One of the first measures they took was the enactment of the Military Reconstruction Act of 1867, in which they took power over Southern state governments by dividing them into five “military districts and made subject to the military authority of the United States.” Southerners, unwilling to accept these fast-paced and forceful changes to their society, reacted with anger and frustration, accusing this new rule of corruption and injustice. In a public speech in the House, Representative L. Q. C. Lamar of Mississippi called the North’s military occupants vessels of “rapacity, cupidity, corruption, grinding oppression, and taxation in its most devouring form,” later proclaiming them as lacking in moral judgment and insulated from the feelings and suffrages of the people of the South. Indignation towards Northern occupation and the presence of carpetbaggers in the South was also expressed in a Southern Newspaper, claiming that they “cursed and almost ruined” the government and threatening to spread this notion “regardless of cost or consequences.” These mentalities also manifested themselves in violent acts and rhetoric. The ideology of the Klu Klux Klan, a group notorious for its brutality towards Republicans and blacks during this time period, had agents in almost all Southern states by 1870 acting as instruments against Radical