Positive And Negative Effects Of Reconstruction

Reconstruction was the rebuilding of the union. Attempts were made to redress slavery and the problems arising. The problem to solve was what were the 4 million freed slaves to do? Most were farmers, none owned land and none had job's nor education.The South was the main battleground of the Civil War. There were two reconstruction plans. There was President Lincoln's plan and there was the Congress Radical Republican plan. (Wade-Davis Bill) President Lincoln's plan was mild and painless. It offered a pardon to any Confederate who would take an oath of allegiance to the Union & accept federal policy on slavery, and allowed each state to hold a constitutional convention only after 10% of the voters who voted in 1860 had sworn allegiance to

Segregation developed, Southern debt was high, taxes were raised to pay Reconstruction and dishonesty and corruption in politics. Southern leaders ignored the 14th and 15th Amendments. Tenure Act of 1867 passed by Congress to try to get rid of President Johnson. The Tenure Act of 1867 also required that Congress give 2/3's approval before the President removing cabinet officers. Johnson challenged it by firing secretary of war Edwin Stanton. In 1868, Johnson impeached by the House, but not convicted by the Senate by a margin of I vote. 17th president, Ulysses Grant (1822-1885) commanded the victorious Union army during the American Civil War (1861-1865) and served as the 18th U.S. president from 1869 to 1877. He also tightened bank regulations. In the years following the Civil War, federal liquor taxes were raised to extremely high rates to help pay off the cost of the fighting. In order to avoid the high tax, many of the nation’s distillers bribed officials in the Department of the Treasury, receiving tax stamps at a fraction of their face value. Treasury Secretary Benjamin H.Bristow eventually caught wind of the dishonesty and launched a massive

Southern states broke up Republican Meetings, burned black churches all across the South and also terrorized and even killed some freed people. From 1868 through the early 1870s the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) functioned as a loosely organized group of political and social terrorists. The Klan's goals included political defeat of the Republican Party and the maintenance of absolute white supremacy in response to newly gained civil and political rights by southern blacks after the Civil War (1861-65). The KKK was a very loosely organized group, and hierarchical structures beyond the county level probably were more symbolic than operational. The Klan in Georgia had an apparent head, the Grand Dragon, who at one point was probably General John B. Gordon. Jim Crow laws were state and local laws enforcing racial segregation in the Southern United States. Jim Crow was the practice of discriminating against black people, through a set of laws passed in the Southern states, after they had earned their freedom from slavery .The term originally referred to a black character in 1800s minstrel shows in which white performers wore "blackface" and pretended to be black