Who Killed Reconstruction Essay

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Who Killed Reconstruction? The South was largely at fault for the failure of one of the most important events in U.S. history. The Ku Klux Klan (KKK) was a white supremacist group in the South that prosecuted radical republicans,carpetbaggers, and freedmen. There was a lot of racism towards freedmen all over the nation but the KKK was the worst of all. The South killed reconstruction because the KKK was murdering people, they were creating fear everywhere in the South, and because of racism. A reason that the South killed reconstruction was because the KKK was murdering people. The KKK began to murder government officials and supporters of reconstruction. “He was foully murdered by the Ku-Klux in the Grand Jury room on Saturday.” (Tourgee 511) The man was a Republican senator and was brutally murdered. The picture shows two men being hanged and one of them is a carpetbagger and the other is a scalawag. (Tourgee 511) This shows that the KKK was murdering people who supported reconstruction and people who did not support their views. Other people say that the North killed reconstruction because there was too much fraud in the government, but …show more content…

The KKK caused fear by threatening other people. “They set in and whipped me a thousand licks more, with sticks and straps that had buckles on the ends of them.” (Colby 513) Abram Colby was a freedman who was in the government during the reconstruction era. The KKK did not like him in the government so they beat him and bribed him to leave the government. They offered Colby $7,500 to leave his place in government but when he refused they whipped him. (Colby 513) Colby did not do anything wrong, he was using his freedoms and he suffered for it. Some say that the North caused reconstruction to fail because they made the KKK want to stop reconstruction. The KKK started to create fear in the South and it helped end