ABSTRACT
When the Civil War ended, the nation faced many questions in the wake of region-wide economic devastation, the collapse of the Confederacy as a governing body, and the emancipation of four million former slaves. What sort of reconstruction process would the South and the nation undergo? Who would run this new South? Would the plantation system remain in effect even though slavery had been abolished? What was the status of African Americans going to be and what rights would they enjoy? The executive and legislative branches battled with each other over these issues until Congress seized control through passage of the Military Reconstruction Act of 1867, an action that divided the South into five military districts and in many ways treated the region as a conquered land. Congressional Reconstruction marked the nation’s first commitment to interracial democracy. The subsequent passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, the flourishing of an indigenous black grassroots political movement, and the oversight of Union troops turned southern politics inside out. Yet these revolutionary changes were fleeting, owing to the incredible escalation of violence initiated by southern whites against African Americans and their supporters, the lack of sustained commitment on the part of the Republican Party, and the Compromise of 1876 which invariably led to the last federal troops being pulled from the South. White southerners in control quickly redoubled their efforts through continued violence, rewrote their state constitutions, instituted an oppressive system of sharecropping rooted in the use of the crop lien, and passed local and state laws mandating segregation. This period, which southern whites referred to as Redemption, ushered in a wave of white supremacy that did not begin to erode until the middle of the twentieth century.
