Underdogs During The Reconstruction Era

Sami Davis

Rowan

American History 2

27 January 2016

Post Civil War

I like to think of the Reconstruction Era as the period of the underdogs! The nation was attempting to unite to make equality possible for all of black and white-skinned Americans. Countless carpetbaggers- northerners who moved south after the war- and scalawags- white Unionists and Republicans in the South- flocked to the South during Reconstruction. These two groups along with newly freed blacks made quite an impact on southern life.

A small portion of humans during this time truly wanted equality, but the majority of people were stuck in their ways, unable to bring themselves out of the past. There was a glimmer of hope that shone for the freed slaves to change their

His plan was extremely lenient; it was based on the idea that the southern states never really seceded from the Union, and that they should not necessarily be punished: “Lincoln could not negotiate a treaty with the Confederate government; he continued to insist that the Confederate government had no legal right to exist. Yet neither could he simply readmit the Southern states into the Union as if nothing happened” (Brinkley, p 400). Abraham Lincoln did not make the abolition of slavery a goal of the Union war because he feared that he would drive the border slave states, who were still loyal to the Union, into the Confederacy, and anger more Conservative

They went so far as to flog, mutilate, and even lynch blacks” (“The End of Reconstruction”). Along with the terrorist mindset, the Mississippi Plan was put into action. The Mississippi Plan was mainly against blacks and poor whites. The men in charge of the official voting book switched the book for the blacks and poor whites to sign from the actual voting registry to a “dead book” (Rowan). It was a way to manipulate elections by using voting fraud and trickery by taking advantage of the open voting process during that time. As a result, the blacks couldn 't vote and their names were lost; their votes were killed off. This changed the political structure for years to come.

The three major failures of Reconstruction were political, social and economic. On the political side, the South resented the North. On the social side, the slaves were freed but not accepted at all into society, as “...one negro counted as three-fifths of a man” (Doc 130, p 310). On the economic side, the loss of slaves was a shock to the economy; so was the war itself since it was fought mainly on Southern