Reconstruction Dbq

In 1863, President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing slaves and reigniting anger within the South and white supremacists. This, arguably, led to the serious debate over the whites’ allowance of African Americans to use their rights, and was more prominent in the South than North. While the American Civil War was occurring, this debate grew larger in size and more prominent in society and politics. Thus, the Reconstruction Era began, in which the U.S. government chose to protect African Americans and support them in using their rights. However, white hate groups did not want African Americans to have a voice in the matters of society, as they continued to see them as slaves and of lower class due to their skin tone.

Eric Foner, contributor to Encyclopedia Britannica and author of many books, describes the Reconstruction as a time in “which attempts were made to redress the inequities of slavery and its political, social, and economic legacy and to solve the problems arising from the readmission to the Union of the 11 states that had seceded at or before the outbreak of war” (Foner). Due to the secession of southern states, President Lincoln tried to weaken their abilities by issuing the Ten Percent Plan, which was when “one-tenth of a state’s prewar voters took an oath of loyalty, they could establish a new state government… the plan was an attempt to weaken the Confederacy rather than a blueprint for the postwar South” (Foner). This, then allowed the government to ensure that the states would not try to secede again, even if they wanted to. It guaranteed that the states would remain a part of the Union, leaving fewer and fewer states in the Confederacy as more voters took this oath. Later on, President Johnson granted state governments the ability to manage their own affairs, which often resulted in southern slaves “enacting the black codes, laws that required African Americans to sign yearly labour contracts and in other ways sought to limit the freedmen’s economic

Examining the specific case of Maria Carter, and the violence she experienced with the Ku Klux Klan, gave more justification towards the need of a government-issued change that the Klan, and other hate groups, would not like to disobey. Carter witnessed one of the most violent instances with the Klan, in which she testified that “they struck her [neighbor] over the head with a pistol. The house looked next morning as if somebody had been killing hogs there. Some of them said ‘Fetch a light here, quick;’ and some of them said to her, ‘Hold a light.’ They said she held it, and they put their guns down on him and shot him” (United States, “Testimony Taken by the Joint Select Committee”). Although Carter’s own husband was innocent, the white supremacists continued to threaten him to prevent him from rising up after being a witness to the abuse of their neighbor. Thus, the members of the Ku Klux Klan “whipped him mightily; I do not know how much… I saw the blood running down when he came back” (United States). They constantly abused this power they believed they had of being the superior race, and murdered many people without getting convicted for it. However, this changed as President Ulysses Grant, and Congress, took action against white supremacists. Joan Waugh, a