Compare And Contrast The North And The South After The Civil War

The winner has always written the history books. So, it came as no surprise that after the North’s victory in the American Civil War, the South was seen as the villain during the Reconstruction Era, all while the North was innocent and spot-free. The truth, however, said differently. The North was not nearly as innocent in Reconstruction, to the point where the Northern states, as a whole, could have killed reconstruction altogether. Reconstruction, in simple terms, was the effort to bring the Southern states back into the nation and mend the Union as one after the Southern states seceded and caused the Civil War. This effort ended when President Rutherford B. Hayes ordered a removal of troops from the Southern states in 1877 – just 12 years

While the fraudulent leadership was not what destroyed the movement, it caused people to turn their focus away from the problems that were relevant to the Southern half of the nation. First, political cartoons were popularly used to express public opinion, good or bad. In a cartoon from 1876, President Ulysses S. Grant is drawn searching and trying to reach the bottom of a barrel, filled with the scandals of the time, such as with the press, whiskey, and states. (Harper’s Weekly, 1876) Additionally, in the words of Gerald Danzer, “… Northern voters grew indifferent to event 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 … corruption in Grant’s administration…” (Gerald Danzer et al., The Americans, McDougal Littell, 1998.) Danzer attempted to relay to the reader that the Northerners were tired of hearing of all the problems but nothing was being done, so instead they started to just focus on something else entirely. Thirdly, Danzer explicitly stated that “… the tide of public opinion in the North began to turn against Reconstruction policies.” (Danzer) This statement was short but powerful against the Union states, and further proved how the North decided to blatantly turn their backs on the South and the

Even the most pro-Freedmen, pro-equal rights Republicans vocalized opinions that rang loud and clear against the freedmen. For instance, the Boston Evening Transcript – a firmly pro-Freedmen publication - was quoted and said, “the blacks, as a people, are unfitted for the proper exercise of political duties,” that showed how even the most supportive Northerners thought that Blacks should not be equal. (Heather Cox Richardson, The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor and Politics in the Post-Civil War North, 1865-1901. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2001) Additionally, the publication said that the Freedmen needed to forget how cruel slavery was before they could become a politician, probably to prevent retaliation against whites for years of mistreatment towards Blacks. Thirdly, in Harper’s Weekly, an artist drew an image of South Carolina’s Legislature. In this image, the African-Americans who were in the legislature are portrayed as wild and unruly, which caused the Northerners to think that Freedmen should not be in positions that could change the laws. (The cover of Harper’s Weekly, March 14, 1874) All three of these instances show how some of the most pro-Freedmen Northerners held an overall racist opinion towards