Military Reconstruction Dbq

President Lincoln was elected in 1860, and his election marked the end of peace between the North and the South for almost two decades. Between 1860 and 1865 the blood of over half a million soldiers from both sides of the country would be shed, and from 1865 to 1877 countless others would die in the name of military reconstruction. However, military reconstruction and civil war are simply byproducts of social and constitutional developments that led up to the revolution. Constitutional and social developments between 1860 and 1877 only served to widen the schism between the North and the South, eventually leading to a revolution.

In 1860 Abraham Lincoln was elected president. After threatening to leave the Union for months, South Carolina

But conferring on the black civil rights in another matter. I know not the authority” (Doc D). The civil rights of African Americans was scary, untrodden territory for the newly united nation. How should they confront the very object that split them apart so harshly in the first place? Out of this stems the Civil Rights Act of 1866. In that same year Senator Lot Morrill from Maine outright states, “...that this species of legislation [Civil Rights Act of 1866] is absolutely revolutionary” (Doc F). The act is revolutionary because African Americans have never had rights, and now those same people are changing up the Constitution, the very basis of the American government. Social changes like this anger the already embarrassed and downtrodden South. The North continues to force the South to follow their will through the military reconstruction after the war, so the South retaliates in typical fashion, with the formation of the KKK. The KKK was meant to scare the African American population across the nation, and it achieved this goal of terror with the help of the new white government. Shown in Thomas Nast’s Reconstruction Era Cartoon in 1874, a member of the KKK is seen shaking hands and making deals with the politician, but it is important to note that the deal goes both ways (Doc I). Nast comments that Reconstruction and South retaliation against African Americans in worse than slavery, and that is a white northern sentiment. This cartoon displays the social changes, how the politics of the new Union have been shaped by the social preferences of the South. Again this is a revolutionary ideal because the government is in the back pocket of the KKK, and the Constitution is being skirted by the very people that are elected to uphold