Reconstruction
...nstruction policies were intended to reorganize the defeated Southern states, provide the means for readmitting them into the Union, and to define the means by which whites and former slaves could live together in a new Southern society freed of slavery. The overwhelming majority of the Southern people, however, saw Reconstruction as a humiliating, even vengeful imposition forced upon them by their Northern conquerors, and did not welcome it. In keeping with Congressional direction, conventions were held in each of the former Confederate states to repeal the ordinances of secession, repudiate the war debt, and draft new state constitutions. Eventually the people of each Southern state elected a governor and a legislature, and when the legislature of a state ratified the Thirteenth Amendment, the new state government was recognized and the state was back in the Union again. By the end of 1865, this process, with a few exceptions, was completed. But the Southern states that had seceded were not yet fully restored to their former positions within the Union because the Congress had not yet seated their United States Senators and Representatives, who were now coming to Washington to take their places in the federal legislature. Two of the most significant measures relating to the South passed by Congress during the Reconstruction era were the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution. The Fourteenth Amendment granting civil rights to Blacks, stated that “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the states in which they reside.” (Feinberg) All the southern state legislatures, with the exception of Tennessee, refused to ratify the amendment. Certain groups in the north then advocated intervention to protect the rights of former slaves in the South. In the Reconstruction Act of March 1867, Congress, ignoring the governments that had been established in the southern states, divided the South into five districts and placed them under military rule. Escape from permanent military government was open to those Southern states that established civil governments, took an oath of allegiance, ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, and adopted Black suffrage. In July 1868 the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified. The Fifteenth Amendment, passed by Congress the following year and ratified in 1870 by state legislatures, provided that “The rights of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” (Feinberg) Another critical measure, the Reconstruction Act, was passed by Congress in the summer of 1868, and readmitted to the Union the states of Arkansas, North Carolina, South Carolina, Louisiana, Georgia, Alabama, and Florida. How representative the new governments of these seven reconstructed states were can be judged from the fact that the majority of the governors, Representatives, and Senators elected were northern men who had gone south after the war to make their political fortunes. Furthermore, in the legislatures of Louisiana, South Carolina, and Mississippi, former slaves gained com...