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The challenges the nation faced in "reconstructing" and reunification of a ravaged and resentful South while helping to transform ex-slaves into free workers and equal citizens are reflected in the brutal incidents. The rebels were not loyal Unionists.

One of the most challenging and significant periods in U.S. history was the Reconstruction era, from 1865 to 1877.

The questions are still important in American life.

In the spring of 1865, a fifth of southern white males had died in the war, and many others had been wounded. Mississippi spent 20 percent of its budget on artificial limbs for Confederate veterans in the 19th century.

Property values had been altered. In the year after the war ended, eighty- one plantations in Mississippi were sold for less than what they were worth in 1860. Thousands of horses and mules had been killed in the fighting, and Confederate money was worthless, personal savings had been wiped out, and farm buildings and agricultural equipment had been destroyed.

Many of the largest southern cities were devastated. Most railroads and many bridges were damaged or destroyed, and Southerners were homeless and hungry.

The warehouses and factories of the Confederacy were set ablaze to prevent them from falling into the hands of the Union. The burned districts of April 1865 are pictured here.

There are women walking among the shambles.

Between 1860 and 1870, northern wealth grew by 50 percent while southern wealth fell by 60 percent. The growth of the cotton culture was enabled by the wipe out of $4 billion invested in slavery.

Tobacco production didn't return to its prewar level until 1880. The sugar crop of Louisiana did not recover until 1893, and the rice economy along the coast of South Carolina and Georgia never regained its prewar levels of production or profit.

The South produced 30 percent of the nation's wealth in 1860, but only 12 percent in 1870.

Resentment in the South boiled over during the Era of Reconstruction. The soldiers were cursed and spat upon. Every day that I live increases my hatred and detestation, and loathing of that race, said a Virginia woman. They disgrace our humanity. There is a sim ilar hatred of the Yankees in the children of southern nationalists.

Reconstruction issues were complicated and controversial, and rebuilding the former Confederate states would not be easy. The Constitution gave Congress authority to create their state governments. The president would have to re- form state governments.

The former slaves wanted to become self reliant, be com pensated for their labor, gain education for their children, and create their own community organizations and social life. Most southern whites were determined to prevent that from happening.

During the war, the first phase of Reconstruction was called Presidential Reconstruction. Lincoln named army generals to be temporary military governors for Confederate areas. He formulated a plan to reestablish governments in states that had been ruled by the Confederates.

In 1863, President Lincoln issued a Proclamation that allowed former Confederate states to re-create a Union government if 10 percent of those who had voted in 1860 swore their loyalty to the Constitution.

Confederate government officials, senior officers of the Confederate army and navy, judges, congressmen, and military officers of the United States who had left their posts to join the rebellion were denied pardons.

Lincoln's program restored pro- Union southern governments. The president should not supervise Reconstruction according to radical Republicans.

They believed that everyone was equal in God's eyes. They didn't want a compro mise with racism.

They wanted to replace the planter elite with a new generation of small farmers.

With the war still raging, the radi cals tried to take charge of Reconstruction by passing the Wade- Davis Bil, named for two leading Republicans.

Lincoln vetoed the bill. Lincoln was accused of exceeding his constitutional authority by the Radicals. Lincoln continued his efforts to restore the Confederate states to the Union. The freed people in the South were rushed assis tance by him.

The Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution abolished slavery in the United States in December of 1865. The issue of freedom became the cen tral issue of Reconstruction. Senator Charles Sumner said that liberty has been won.

The Freedmen's Bureau set up schools for former slaves in the former Confederacy.

It was the first federal effort to help people. Its task was difficult. General Wil liam T. Sherman warned that his friend, General Oliver O. Howard, had been appointed to lead the Freedmen's Bureau.

He sent agents to the South to negotiate labor contracts between freed people and white people. The Bureau helped set up schools and provided medical care to the former slaves. The schools for mer slaves were established by the Northern missionary societies.

The Freedmen's Bureau oversaw over 4,000 new schools by 1870. The Freedmen's Bureau helped former slaves reestablish connection with their family members and legalized mar riages that had been banned prior to the war.

Hundreds of freed slaves gathered on a South Carolina island in 1865. The highest-ranking officer in the U.S. Col ored Troops addressed them. He was a prominent abolitionist in the North before the Civil War. The Confederacy was urged to be undermined. Freedom was in sufficiency, and Slav- former slaves to achieve economic self- ery was dead.

His people shouted, "Yes, yes, yes."

Such assumptions were not intended to restore forced labor for blacks. They would find themselves slaves again if they couldn't become economical and self reliant.

The planters thought that the speeches would cause open rebellion among southern blacks.

Abraham Lincoln would not allow a federal Recon struction of the Confederacy. The president who yearned for a peace with malice toward none, with charity for al, offered his last view of Reconstruction in the final speech of his life.

Lincoln rejected cal s for peace on April 11, 1865. He wanted no persecution, no bloody work, no hangings of Confederate leaders, and no attempts to restructure southern social and economic life. Lincoln and his wife Mary Todd attended a play at Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C., on April 14.

With his trusted bodyguard called away toRichmond, Lincoln was less protected as twenty-six year old John Wilkes Booth snuck into the unguarded presidential box and shot the president in the head. Booth broke his leg when he jumped from the box to the stage after he stabbed Lincoln's military aide. He rode a horse and fled the city. Lincoln died nine hours later.

Vice President Andrew Johnson and Secretary of State William H. Seward were both killed at the same time as Booth was shooting the president. The assassin got drunk in the bar of the vice president's hotel and escaped injury. Five people, including his son, suffered knife wounds when attacked at home.

The nation was stunned. The funeral service was held in the East Room of the White House. Vice President Andrew Johnson took the oath of office as the new president. Grant was summoned to defend Washington, D.C. by the Secretary of War, who was not sure if the assassination was a sign of a Confederate invasion.

The conspirators were given a full measure of vengeance by the nation.

Three of Booth's col aborators were sentenced to death by a military court and hanged, as was Mary Surratt, who owned the boardinghouse where the assassinations had been planned.

There was a lot of grief after Lincoln's death.

There were planned celebrations for victory. There is a photograph of the assassination of Lincoln displayed in New York's City Hall rotunda.

Lincoln's body lay in state for several days in Washington, D.C., before being transported 1,600 miles to be buried in Springfield, Illinois. In Philadel phia, 300,000 mourners paid their last respects while in New York City, half a million people viewed the president's body. Lincoln was buried on May 4.

Andrew Johnson, a pro- Union Democrat from Tennessee, was elected to the White House. Johnson was added to Lincoln's National Union ticket in order to help the president win reelection. Johnson hated both the white southern elite and the idea of racial equality. He had a weakness for alcohol. At the inaugural ceremonies in 1865, he delivered his address in a state of drunkenness.

Johnson was a self-made man. He lost his father when he was three years old and never attended school. His mother was a tailor. He ran away from home at thirteen and settled in Green eville, nestled in the mountains of East Tennessee, where he became a tailor.

He learned how to read and write from his wife.

Johnson sold five slaves in 1863. He served as the mayor, a state legislator, governor, congressional representative, and the U.S. senator. The trajectory of Johnson's life was described by a friend as one intense, continuous, desperate upward struggle during which he identified with the poor farmers and came to hate the wealthy planters.

During the Civil War, Johnson called himself a Jacksonian Democrat. Johnson, a Democrat from Tennessee, became president after the racists of most southern whites. During his presidency, Lincoln was assassinated.

The most hurt by the slave system were the Impoverished whites, according to Johnson. He said that white men must manage the South.

As a states' rights Democrat, Johnson wanted the federal government to be small and inactive. Republican economic policies were opposed by him.

In May 1865, Johnson issued a new Proclamation ofAmnesty that excluded ex-Confederates who had been barred from holding office by Lincoln, and anyone with property worth more than $20,000.

Johnson wanted to prevent the wealthiest Southerners from regaining political power.

Johnson pardoned 7,000 Confederates and most of the white "aristocrats" by the end of the 19th century. Johnson decided that he could get the political support of prominent Southerners by pardoning them.

The con vention of men elected by loyal voters was to be called by each governor. Each state convention had to approve the Thirteenth Amendment. African Americans have the right to vote.

Except for Mississippi, the former Confederate states ignored Johnson's suggestion about voting rights for blacks.

Lincoln and Johnson didn't want to ask freed people in the South what they needed. The former slaves took matters into their own hands. They demanded citizenship, land of their own, and voting rights when they met and marched. In and around large cities such as New Orleans, Mobile, Norfolk, Wilmington, Nashville, Memphis, and Charleston, former slaves organized regular meetings, chose leaders, protested mistreat ment, learned the workings of the federal bureaucracy, and sought economic opportunities.

During the summer and fall of 1865, liberated slaves and Northern African Americans organized Equal Rights Associations.

They were eager to counter the whites' only state convention being organized under Johnson's Reconstruction plan. Virtual, all the freedmen's conventions forged resolutions that stressed their desire for free public education, their need for paying jobs and their own land, and their insistence on full civil rights.

James Walker Hood, a free black from Connecticut, was elected president of the North Carolina freedmen's convention. He emphasized their goals in his acceptance speech, "We and the white people have to live here together."

The freedmen's convention demanded that their voices be heard in Washington and southern state capitals. Any attempt to reconstruct the states was asserted by the Virginia freedmen's con vention.

Radical Republicans were pleased by President Johnson's assault on the southern planter elite. The most extreme Radicals wanted Reconstruction to provide social and political equality for black people. They didn't like Johnson's efforts to bring the South back into the Union.

The Confederate states were readmitted to the Union by congress, not the president. Johnson was against the expansion of federal authority. The states have the right to control their affairs.

The former Confederates agreed with Johnson. After the war, most white South erners didn't forget the war or their defeat, and they resented and resisted the North's efforts to reconstruct their homeland. He and others wanted to rebuild the new South as it had been before the war, and they were determined to do so in their own way and under their own leadership.

They didn't want their beloved region to be rebuilt by outsiders.

When the U.S. Congress met for the first time since the end of the war, the new southern state governments looked very similar to the Confederate governments. The newly freed slaves were denied voting rights. Confederate leaders were elected as their new U.S. senators and congressmen. The former vice president of the Confederacy was elected by Geor gia.

Four Confederate generals, eight colonels, six cabinet members, and several Confederate legislators were elected across the South.

Outraged Republicans denied seats to all such "Rebel" officials and appointed a Joint Committee on Reconstruction to develop a new plan to bring the Confederate states back into the Union.

White violence against blacks was common. Whites still whipped blacks as if they were slaves, according to a former slave. In 1865, he estimated that 2,000 freed people had been killed in Shreveport.

White mobs murdered African Americans in Memphis and New Orleans in the summer of 1865. No one was arrested for the chaos.

The massacres were caused by Andrew John son's policy towards white supremacists, argued Radical Republicans. The Fourteenth Amendment extended federal civil rights protections to African Americans after the race riots.

Black protests over restrictive laws passed by the new all- white south ern state legislatures triggered the violence against southern blacks.

State to state, black codes varied.

Mississippi made black people dependent on their white employers because they couldn't hunt or fish.

Black marriages were recognized, but not interracial marriages. Life imprisonment was the punishment faced by violators.

African Americans were not allowed to vote, serve on juries, or testify against whites. They couldn't own farmland in Mississippi or city property in South Carolina. Every black male over the age of eighteen in Mississippi had to be trained by a white.

The "convict lease" system was used by states to cut the costs of housing prisoners. Coal mines, lumber camps, and brickyards were some of the most exploitive labor systems in history, as people convicted of crimes, mostly African Americans, were hired out by county and state governments to work for them. In other words, convict leasing was a form of neo- slavery.

Andrew Johnson was challenged over Reconstruction pol icies by the Radi cal Republicans. The Freedmen's Bureau received funding when Johnson vetoed the bill. The Republicans couldn't overturn the veto. Johnson criticized the Radical Republicans for their promotion of black civil rights. Moderate Republicans supported the Radicals after they deserted the president. "Johnson has become an alien enemy of a foreign state," said Stevens.

The legislation upset Johnson. He was angry that Congress could not grant citizenship to blacks. Republicans overrode Johnson's veto of the Era of Reconstruction 1865-1877 Rights Act, which discriminated against the white race.

It was the first time in history that Congress had overturned a presidential veto. President Johnson lost both public and political support after that point.

It guaranteed citizenship to immigrant children who were born in the United States. Taking aim at the black codes, it also prohibited any efforts to violate the civil rights of "citizens," black or white; to deprive any person of life, liberty, or prop erty, without due process of law; or to "deny any person".

Congress gave the federal government responsibility for protecting civil rights. The amendment was approved by three quarters of the states in 1868. The states of the former Confederacy had to approve the amendment before they could be readmitted to the Union.

The south ern states were urged by President Johnson to refuse to approve the amend ment. Johnson was the 14th amendment. The detail is losing support in the North. The case of a black man who was whipped for a cal ed Johnson, despite federal orders prohibiting such forms of punishment, illustrates a case in Raleigh, North York newspaper editor.

Johnson went on a speaking tour of the Midwest in order to win votes for the Democrats in the congressional elections. His speeches backfired.

The Radical Republicans were described by Johnson as "fac tious, domineering, tyrannical" men. While the president was speaking from the back of a railway car, the engineer pulled the train out of the tracks, making him look like a fool.

Voters agreed. In the congressional elections of 1866, the Radical Republican can didates won more than a two- thirds majority in each house, meaning they were able to override presidential vetoes. The process of reconstructing the former Confederacy would be taken over by Congressional Republicans.

The Military Reconstruction Act was part of the Congressional Reconstruction plan. The new governments were abolished under Johnson's Reconstruction policies. Military control over ten of the former Con federate states was established by Congress. The other ten states were divided into five military districts, each commanded by an army general.

There wasn't enough soldiers to enforce Congressional Reconstruction. The entire state of Mississippi had less than 400 soldiers.

Black or white, rich or poor, landless or property owners were guaranteed the right to vote by the Military Reconstruction Act. Black or white women were not allowed to vote.

Once a majority of voters approved the new constitutions, the state legislatures had to approve the Fourteenth Amendment, which would give the former Confederate states representation in Congress. Several hundred African American dele gates participated in the convention.

The president is required to issue army orders through the general.

The Tenure of Office Act stipulated that the Senate must approve any effort to remove federal officials who were confirmed by the Senate. The act was intended to prevent Johnson from firing Secretary of War, who was the most outspoken critic in the cabinet.

The most sweeping peacetime legislation in American history was embodied by Congressional Reconstruction. It wanted freed slaves to be involved in the creation of new state governments in the former Confederacy. "This is the promise of America," he said.

The first two years of Reconstruction produced dramatic changes in the South, as new state legislature rewrote their constitutions.

Andrew Johnson stood in the way of the Radical Republicans in Reconstruction. More and more Radicals decided that the president should be removed from office.

The Ten ure of Office Act was considered an illegal restriction of presidential power by Johnson and he replaced him with Grant.

The Radicals had a chance. Johnson had violated the Tenure of Office Act by removing Stanton.

The Senate galleries are filled with people watching the trial.

He had opposed the policies of the Radical Republicans.

On March 5, 1868, the first Senate trial of a sitting president began. There was a packed gallery of journalists, foreign dignitar ies, and political officials.

Edmund G. Ross, a young Radical from Kansas, cast the deciding vote in favor of acquittal, knowing that his vote would ruin his political career. The evidence against Johnson was insufficient for conviction. Ross looked into his open grave. Everything that makes life desirable.

Ross was ostracized by the Angry Radicals of the Era of Reconstruction. He died of poverty after losing his reelection campaign.

The effort to remove Johnson was a mistake because it weakened public support for Congressional Reconstruction.

Johnson's private agreement to stop obstructing Congressional Reconstruction was gained by the Radical cause.

Johnson was urged by General Grant to exert more federal force in the South. Johnson said it was a local issue. Federal troops should not be in it.

Grant wouldn't take no for an answer. He continued to point out that white people were trying to intimidate freed people.

In June 1868, congressional Republicans announced that eight southern states could send delegates to Congress.

The leaders of the movement to secure voting rights for women insisted that the amendment should have included women.

Black and white women would have to wait another fifty years for the right to vote.

The backlash in the South was caused by the Fifteenth Amendment. The resentment of Reconstruction was deepened by the idea of the federal government guaranteeing the right of freedmen to vote.

Other states followed suit.

The Naturalization Act of 1870 was passed four months after the Fifteenth Amendment became law. Asians and Native Americans were not included in the new law.

Many former slaves created their own social institutions in order to forge new lives.

The course of Reconstruction was affected by African Americans. It was not easy because whites still practiced racism.

Most southern blacks thought that their best chance to make a living was by working for their former owners. The Freedmen's Bureau and federal soldiers ordered them to sign labor con tracts with local whites. A black soldier tried to control the Union with an amputation leg amount of wages paid to freedmen. It clasps hands with a white amputee in a cartoon.

The Era of Reconstruction 1865-1877 White Southerners used terror, intimidation, and violence to suppress black efforts to gain social and economic equality. The war was still going on as armed men tried to stop federal efforts to recon struct the South. A black woman in Georgia was given sixty-five lashes for using abusive language during an encounter with a white woman. The Civil War gave freedom to enslaved African Americans, but they did not have protection against exploitation or abuse.

Union soldiers and northern observers were surprised that freed slaves did not leave the South. The Union officer said that southern blacks were more attached to familiar places than any other group.

Many freedmen were trained in leadership by being in the Union army or navy. The first generation of African American political leaders in the postwar South were formed by black military veterans.

Military service gave many former slaves the chance to learn to read and write, which gave them new possibilities for economic advancement, social respectability, and civic leadership. A fervent sense of nationalism was instilled by fighting for the Union cause.

During and after the war, African American religious life in the South changed.

Slaves who attended white churches were forced to sit in the back. Both black and white ex- slaves established their own churches after the war, which became the crossroads for black community life.

Ministers became social and political leaders. Baptists and Methodists reached out to the working poor in part because they were already the largest denominations in the South. The African Methodist Episcopal Church gained 50,000 members in the year 1866. More than one million African Americans in the South became Baptists by 1890.

African American communities created schools. A former slave said that starting schools was the first proof of freedom. Before the Civil War, most plantation owners denied an education to their slaves to keep them from organizing uprisings. After the war, the white elite worried that education would distract poor whites and blacks from their work in the fields or encourage them to leave the South in search of better social and economic opportunities.

The opposition of southern whites to education for blacks made public schools more important to African Americans. She walked five miles to school as a child, earned a scholarship to college, and went on to become the first black woman to attend a four-year college in Florida.

600 blacks, most of them former slaves, were elected as state legislators under Congressional Reconstruction because of the denial of voting rights to ex-Confederates. A former Union soldier was elected lieutenant governor in the Era of Reconstruction.

Americans were elected to high state offices. Fourteen black congressmen served in the U.S. House of Representatives, two of which were natives of Mississippi.

The election of black politicians disgusted whites. The freed slaves were uneducated and had no civic experience. Blacks were no different than millions of poor or immigrant white males who had been voting and serving in office for years.

Some freedmen confessed their disadvantages. Beverly Nash, an African American delegate, told his colleagues that they were not prepared for the vote.

In time, a man will learn a trade if he is given tools and allowed to use them.

Two people served in the U.S. Senate. The major figure in the abolitionist movement was Frederick Douglass.

Many ex- slaves said that land was what they needed the most.

After taking control of Confederate areas during the war, the Union armies gave former slaves land in several southern states.

Andrew Johnson reversed the transfers of white- owned property to former slaves. They knew that their freedom came from their ownership of land. "Our wives, our children, our husbands, has been sold over and over again to purchase the lands we now locates on," a Virginia freed man said.

Thousands of former slaves were forced to return their farms to white people. It was difficult for former slaves to get loans to buy farmland because few banks were willing to lend to blacks. Their sense of betrayal was profound.

They would give up their portion of the crop if they left. One of the earliest American homeless took a picture of a family being evicted from their Virginia home in 1899 and left them unemployed and subject to arrest.

Most white plantation owners and small farmers were determined to control African Americans as if they were still slaves. It pushed the sharecrop deeper in debt if bad weather or insects disrupted the harvest.

Many freed blacks preferred sharecropping because it freed them from day to day supervision by whites. Most sharecroppers, black and white, were trapped in debt to the land owner with little choice but to remain tied to the system of dependence that felt like slavery.

African Americans in the postwar South were not a single community. There were differences between the few who owned property and the many who did not. Less than 7 percent of black people owned land in North Carolina by 1870.

Most of the northern blacks and the southern free blacks were city dwellers and mulattos, so they opposed efforts to redistribute land to the freedmen. African Americans focused on common concerns and unity prevailed.

Many African Americans served in state government. The label "black Recon struction" distorts African American political influence. The large number of white Republicans in the mountain areas of the Upper South favored the Radical plan for Reconstruction, which was criticized.

The Republican state convention in South Carolina had a black majority.

Florida and Virginia were the only two states where more than 20% of the members were black.

The Texas convention was only 10 percent black, and North Carolina's was 11 percent, which did not stop a white newspaper from calling it a group of "baboons, monkeys, mules."

In some state elections since 1867, former slaves have been voting in large numbers.

Critics argued that the 30,000 scheming Northerners, mostly young men, who rushed South with their belongings in cheap suitcases made of carpeting to grab political power or buy plantations, were the carpetbaggers.

Some of the Northerners were corrupt opportunists.

Union military veterans were drawn to the South to rebuild the devastated economy. Many other people, such as teachers, social workers, attorneys, physicians, editors, and ministers, were called carpetbaggers because they wanted to help free blacks and poor whites.

After the war, the Union general who won the Medal of Honor stayed in the South to help former slaves. He was elected a Republican in 1870 and served as the military governor of Mississippi.

The scalawags, or southern white Republicans, were hated by the Southern Democrats.

The majority of scalawags had been Union ists. In the mountain counties of Georgia, Tennessee, and Alabama, they were prominent.

James Longstreet, the former Confederate general who decided that the Old South must change its ways, was one of the scalawags. He became a cotton broker in New Orleans and joined the Republican party.

The bag in front of Joseph E. Brown was filled with an ernor of Georgia who urged Southerners' faults.

The scalawags were willing to work with Republicans to rebuild the southern economy.

They used legal and illegal means to redeem their beloved South from northern control, Republican rule and black equality.

White southern ministers said that God supported white supremacy. Many northern religionists became "apostles of forgiveness" for their southern white brethren in an attempt to reconcile the Protestant denominations of the North and South.

During Reconstruction, exploitation and abuse increased among African Americans. The first attempts to deny equal ity were created by the white state governments.

Hundreds were killed across the South and many more were injured in a systematic effort to keep blacks out.

D. B. Whitesides, a white farmer in Texas, told Charles Brown, a former slave, that his freedom would do him little good. "Yes," a bleeding Brown said.

The death of slavery did not mean the birth of true freedom for African Americans. Resistance to Radical Reconstruction became more violent for a growing number of southern whites. The Ku Klux Klan, the White Line, and the White League were some of the terrorist groups.

The Klan and other groups started as a social club with spooky costumes and secret rituals. Most of the members of the group were former Confederate soldiers. The district that included Louisiana and Texas was supervised by General Philip Sheridan.

Anger over the Confederate defeat, resentment against federal soldiers occupying the South, and fear that former slaves might seek revenge against whites were some of the motives of these groups. The Klansmen spread rumors, issued threats, and burned schools and churches. During one massacre, a white supremacist said they were going to kill all the Negroes.

The Republican state governments were overturned. The new constitutions they created remained in effect for years, and later constitutions incorporated many of their most progressive features.

The Republican state governments brought about changes to reflect changing populations and protected black voting rights. The "good old boy" tradition of rewarding political supporters with state government jobs was weakened by the change of more state offices from appointed to elected positions.

Poor whites were gaining political clout for the first time in South Carolina, threatening the dominance of wealthy white plantation owners and merchants, which was why the former Confederate leaders opposed the Republican state legislature.

The achievements of the Republican state in the South were remarkable. They rebuilt an extensive railroad network and established public school systems that were open to all children. 600,000 black children were in southern schools by the year 1877.

The poor, orphanages, asylums, and institutions for the blind were given more attention by the Radicals. roads, bridges, and buildings were repaired or rebuilt. It is possible for Americans to achieve rights and opportunities that would be repeatedly violated in coming decades but would never be taken away, at least in principle, such as equality before the law, attend schools, learn to read and write, enter professions, and carry on business.

Government officials were also involved in corrupt practices. Bribes and kick backs are when companies give government officials cash or stock in exchange for government contracts. Henry Clay Warmoth, a twenty-six year old carpetbagger, turned his annual salary of $8,000 into a million dollar fortune while he was governor of Louisiana.

In the North and the Midwest, state governments gave money to corporations under certain conditions that invited shady dealings and corruption. Some railroad corporations received state funds but never built railroads. The Radical Republican regimes did not invent corruption. Governor Warmoth said that corruption is a problem in Louisiana.

Andrew Johnson's presidency made it possible for Republicans to choose their own president in 1868. The Union victory in the Civil War was credited to the "Lion of Vicksburg", and both parties wooed him.

The Republicans unanimously nominated him as their presidential candidate because of his falling out with Johnson.

Congressional Reconstruction was endorsed by the Republican party. Grant promised that if elected, he would enforce the laws and promote prosperity.

The false belief that black men were sexual pred ators waiting for white women was used as a justification for lynchings in the South.

Blair's comments cost Seymour a close election according to a Democrat. Grant won all but eight states and swept the electoral college, but his popular major was only 307,000 out of 6 million votes. This campaign banner made reference to the South, which accounted for Grant's margin to the working class origins of victory, and many of the presidential candidates risked their lives to support him.

The efforts of Radical Republicans to ensure voting rights for southern blacks had paid off. As far as black voters were concerned, the Republican party was the only thing that mattered.

Grant, the youngest president up to that time, was a brave defender of Congressional Reconstruction, but he was not a great president. He admitted that he did not have any previous experience in politics or civil life. I thought I could run the government of the United States like I did the staff of my army.

Grant was blind to the political forces and self-serving influence peddlers around him. He showed poor judgement in his selection of cabinet members, often favoring friendship, family, loyalty, and military service over integrity and ability.

His cabinet positions changed frequently during his two terms in office. Some of the men betrayed his trust. General William T. Sherman said he felt sorry for Grant because so many Republicans used the president for their own selfish gains. Carl Schurz, a Union war hero who became a Republican senator from Missouri, expressed frustration that Grant was misled by cunning advisers.

Grant brought diversity to the federal government.

President Grant insisted that freed people be allowed to exercise their civil rights without fear of violence, even though he viewed Recon struction of the South as the nation's top priority. On March 30, 1870, Grant delivered a speech to Congress in which he celebrated the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, which gave voting rights to American men nationwide.

The backlash in the South was caused by the Fifteenth Amendment. The resentment of Reconstruction was deepened by the idea of the federal government guaranteeing the right of freedmen to vote. New ways to restrict black voting were devised by white officials in Georgia. Other states followed suit.

The Naturalization Act of 1870 was passed four months after the Fifteenth Amendment became law. Asians and Native Americans were not included in the new law.

The consequences of the Fifteenth Amendment were enormous. Republicans were eager to recruit black voters while Southern whites were afraid of them. The Union Leagues were organized by Republicans. The Loyal League was founded by Republicans in the 19th century to support Lincoln, the war, and the party. The league claimed more than half a million members by late 1863.

In the postwar South, the league operated like a frat, with initiations and rituals and secret meetings to protect freed people from being attacked by angry white Democrats. They met in churches, schools, homes, and fields, often hearing from northern speakers who traveled the South extolling the Republican party and encouraging blacks to register and vote. The Union League in the South became one of the largest black social movements in history by the early 1870s. With the help of the Union Leagues, 90 percent of the freedmen in the South registered to vote, almost all of them as Republicans, and they voted in record numbers.

Black voters outnumbered whites in Mississippi and South Carolina.

Most white Southerners were eager to deny freedmen the vote, so voting was not easy. "All the blacks who vote against my ticket will walk the plank," said the former Georgia governor, who had been a Confederate general. African American workers who exercised their political rights were fired, as a Union officer reported from Virginia.

Black Republicans were coercive at times. A white South Carolina Democrat said that the Negroes were as intol erant of opposition as the whites.

Black men were able to win elected offices for the first time in the states of the former Confederacy because of the Union Leagues' help. In 1870, Francis Cardozo, a black minister who served as president of the South Carolina Council of Union Leagues, declared that the state had "prospered in every respect" because of the enfranchisement of black voters.

President Grant looked at Native Americans the same way he looked at African Americans. The first Native Ameri to hold the position of Commissioner of Indian Affairs was appointed by him in 1869.

During the war, he was Grant's military secretary. Many Indians were pressured by white settlers, miners, railroads, and telegraph companies to give up their ancestral lands as a result of the policies created by the commissioner.

Grant created a new policy for peace with Native Americans.

Grant promised to end chronic corruption in which congressmen appointed cronies as government traders with access to the Indian reservations. Food, clothing, and other provisions intended for the reservations were supplied by many traders who used their positions to scam the Native Americans out of the federal government. The brother of the pres ident was one of the accused traders.

Grant moved the Bureau of Indian Affairs out of the control of Congress and into the War Department to clean up the Indian Ring. The Board of Indian Commissioners was created to oversee the operations of the Bureau of Indian Affairs to make sure that there was no corruption. Grant assumed that honesty, humility, and pacifism would improve the distribution of government resources when he appointed Quakers as reservation traders. Grant told them that it would take the fight out of the Indians if they could make the Quakers out of them. Government bureaucrats were better able to manage Indian policy than the Quakers were.

Grant found a gap between the policies he created and the implementation of them by others.

Many of the officers and soldiers sent to the West to "pacify" Indian peoples in the Great Plains had a different attitude than Grant's. He argued that Native Americans who refused to move should be killed. T. Sherman agreed with General Wil liam.

Indians were one of the only groups denied citizenship because of such attitudes. He said race hatred was the greatest poison of the age and it was directed at both African Americans and Native Americans. Most white Americans didn't care that racism was happening. We will never be able to be just to other races.

President Grant's naive trust in people led to his administration's downfall. Grant may have been awestruck by the men of wealth because of his own failures as a storekeeper and farmer. He was lured into their web of self-serving deception as they lavished gifts and attention on him.

In the summer of 1869, two unprincipled financial schemers, Jay Gould and James Fisk Jr., both notorious for bribing politicians and judges, plotted with the president's brother- in- law to "corner" the nation's gold. They wanted to create a public craze for gold by chasing large quantities of the precious metal.

If the federal Treasury were to sell large amounts of gold, it would deflate the market value of the scheme. People assumed that Grant supported Gould and Fisk when he was in public with them. The value of the rumor that the president endorsed the run-up in gold went up as it spread in New York City.

The Gould- Fisk scheme worked for a while on September 24, 1869. The price of gold went from $150 an ounce to $165 in a single day.

Grant and his Treasury secretary realized what was happening and began selling gold. The price dropped to $138 within fifteen minutes. The schemers lost money.

Some traders cried. One fainted and the other felt the need to take his own life. The turmoil spread to the entire stock market.

After the gold bubble burst, financial markets were in a state of disrepair.

The first scandal to rock the Grant administration was the plot to corner the gold market. Merchants who traded with Indians at army posts in the West bribed the secretary of war. Whiskey distillers bribed federal Treasury agents in order to avoid paying excise taxes on alcohol. Grant's personal secretary took secret payments in exchange for confidential information. Grant urged Congress to investigate.

He said that no guilty man should escape.

There was no evidence that Grant was involved in any way. His poor choice of associates earned him a lot of criticism. Democrats scolded Republicans for their "monstrous corruption and extravagance" and reinforced public suspicion that elected officials were less servants of the people than they were self-serving bandits.

The Republican party lost its identity after the end of slavery. Republicans were divided into two warring groups due to disagreements over political corruption and Recon struction. Liberal Republicans, led by Senator Carl Schurz, embraced free trade and opposed any government regulation of business and industry.

Liberal Republicans wanted to remove the "tyrannical" Grant from the pres idency. They wanted to lower the tariffs on big corporations and promote "civil service reforms" to end the "partisan tyranny" of the "patronage system" whereby new presidents rewarded the "selfish greed" of political supporters with federal government jobs.

Grant and his cronies were accused of making decisions to benefit themselves. Grant's efforts to suppress racism and the Ku Klux Klan were opposed by them. There was no need for federal intervention in the South according to them. The presence of federal troops does not remove white prejudice against the negro.

If the Liberal Republicans were to win, they would need the support of Democrats who were hostile to them.

Southern Democrats liked Greeley's criticism of Reconstruc tion.

The vote was given to "ignorant" former slaves whose "Nigger Government" exercised "absolute political supremacy" in sev eral states and was transferring wealth from the "most intelligent" and "influ ential" southern whites to themselves.

The majority of Northerners were appalled at Greeley's candidacy.

In the 1872 balloting, Greeley did not carry a single state in the North. Grant won thirty- one states and got 3,598,235 votes. His wife died six days before the election, and he died three weeks later.

Grant was delighted that the "soreheads and thieves who had deserted the Republican party" were defeated, and he promised to avoid the "mistakes" he had made in his first term.

Grant's second term was dominated by complex financial issues. Prior to the Civil War, paper money was issued by state banks and could be exchanged for gold coins. State bank notes and gold coins can be used as currency.

When the greenbacks were issued, this happened. After the war, the U.S. Treasury assumed that gold, silver, and copper coins would be recalled from circulation so that consumer prices would decline and the nation could return to a " hard- money" currency.

The most vocal supporters of a return to hard money were eastern cred itors who did not want their debtor to pay them in paper currency. The gold standard was criticized by farmers and other people. Soft money advocates opposed taking green backs out of circulation because it would make it harder for them to pay their debts and bring down prices for their crops and livestock. The Treasury stopped withdrawing dollars in 1868 because of congressional supporters of the soft money policy.

President Grant was in favor of the hard- money camp. On March 18, 1869, he signed the Public Credit Act, which said that investors who purchased bonds to help finance the war effort must be paid back in gold. The act led to a decline in consumer prices. There was a ferocious political debate over the merits of hard and soft money that would last throughout the 19th century.

President Grant's effort to withdraw greenbacks from circulation caused a major economic problem.

Jay Cooke and Company, the nation's leading business lender, went bankrupt and closed its doors on September 18, 1873, after two dozen overextended railroads stopped paying their bil s.

Other hard- pressed banks began shutting down as a result of the shocking news.

3 million workers lost their jobs, and those with jobs saw their wages slashed. In major cities, the homeless and the unemployed formed long lines at soup kitchens.

The U.S. Treasury reversed course after the depression and began printing more dollars. In 1874, Grant overruled his cabinet and vetoed a bill to issue even more green backs. His decision was applauded by bankers and other lenders.

What was then the worst depres sion in the nation's history was only prolonged by Grant's decision. The 1874 congressional elections brought about a catastrophe for Republicans, as Democrats blamed them for the hard times. The Republicans in the House went from 70 percent major to 37 percent minority. The Senate was placed on the defensive.

President Grant tried to enforce federal efforts to reconstruct the postwar South, but southern resistance to "Radical rule" increased and turned violent.

The program of murder, violence, and intimidation was focused on prominent Republicans, black and white, elected officials, teachers in black schools, state militias. In Mississippi, a black Republican leader was killed in front of his family. In 1870, three white scalawag Republicans were murdered in Geor gia, and in Alabama, four black people were killed by an armed mob of whites. The Alabama Republican asked the President to intervene.

G. T. F. Boulding wrote "Give us poor people some guarantee of our lives."

White supremacists were violent in South Carolina. In 1871, some 500 masked men laid siege to the Union County jail and eventually lynched eight black prisoners. Thirty African Americans were killed by Klansmen in Mississippi in 1871.

The Republicans in Congress responded with three Enforce ment Acts. Penalties were imposed on anyone who interfered with a citizen's right to vote. In southern districts where political terrorism flourished, the second dispatched federal supervisors. The Ku Klux Klan Act was enacted in order to outlaw various activities of the KKK. The president could send federal troops to any community where voting rights were being violated. Grant appeared before Congress to urge passage of the Klan Act when some Republicans were against it.

Grant sent Attorney General Amos Akerman, a Georgian, to recruit prosecutors and marshals to enforce the legislation. In South Carolina alone, Akerman and federal troops convinced local juries to convict 1,143 Klansmen. The Klan was killed by Grant's actions.

The Enforcement Acts weren't consistently enforced. As a result, the violent efforts of southern whites increased.

A group of black Republicans were holed up in the courthouse in the black Republican township of Colfax when a mob of 140 white people attacked them. An officer reported that federal troops found a lot of black bodies being picked over by dogs and buzzards. He said they couldn't find the body of a white man.

He imposed military rule after declaring parts of Louisiana to be in a state of insurrection. The Enforce ment Acts were used to indict seventy whites, but only nine were put on trial and three were convicted.

From state to state, the Klan's impact on southern politics varied. Democrats won local elections in the Era of Reconstruction. The Klan had more serious effects in the Lower South. In Yazoo County, Missis used terrorism to reverse the political balance of power. In the 1873 elections, the Republicans cast 2,449 votes and the Dem ocrats 638; two years later, the Democrats got 4,049 votes, the Republicans 7. Black legislators, public schools for black children, and poll taxes were instituted by Democrats after they regained power.

Black and white Repub licans were discouraged by the activities of white supremacists. "We are powerless and unable to organize," wrote a Mississippi scal awag. Northerners used federal troops to reconstruct the South.

President Grant wanted to use federal force to serve peace.

Grant was disappointed that the new anti- segregation law gave little authority. Those who felt their rights were being violated had to file a lawsuit and the penalties were not very high. The Civil Rights Act was struck down by the Supreme Court because it did not have authority over the policies of private businesses or individuals.

Republican political control in the South and public interest in protecting civil rights gradually loosened during the 1870s as all- white "Conservative" par ties mobilized the anti- Reconstruction vote. They called themselves Conserva tives because they were conserva tives. Conservatives used tricks to rig the voting.

Republican political control ended in Virginia and Tennessee as early as 1869, but North Carolina had a Republican governor until 1876.

Whites abandoned the Klan for intimidation in groups such as the Mississippi Rifle Club and the South Carolina Red Shirts. After the elec tions of 1876, the country's commitment to Congressional Reconstruction was undermined by the return of the old white political elite.

The effects of the Thir teenth and Fourteenth Amendments were weakened by key rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court.

In 1869, the Louisiana legislature granted a single company a monopoly of the livestock slaughtering business in New Orleans as a means of protecting public health. Competing butchers sued the state, arguing that the monopoly violated their "privileges" as U.S. citizens and deprived them of property without due process of law.

The "privileges and immunities" clause of the Fourteenth Amendment did not violate the monopoly because it only applied to U.S. citizenship. States retained legal jurisdiction over their citizens, and federal protection of civil rights did not extend to the property rights of businesses.

Stephen was a Dissenting Justice. Field argued that the Fourteenth Amendment was rendered useless by the Court's ruling.

The Court argued that the equal protection and due process clauses in the Fourteenth amendment did not apply to the behavior of individuals. The convictions were outside the reach of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment because of the prosecution's failure to prove racial intent.

The Enforcement Acts were struck down by the justices because they ruled that the states were responsible for protecting citizens from attack by other private citizens.

The federal government abandoned its role in Reconstruction.

Many Republicans lost confidence in President Grant's leadership when he wanted to run for a third term in 1876. He announced that he would retire in the summer of 1875. After newspapers revealed that he had secretly promised political favors to railroad executives in exchange for shares of stock in the company, the candidacy of the former Speaker of the House crumbled.

The scandal led to the selection of the favorite son of Ohio. A former Union general who had been wounded five times during the Civil War, he had served three terms as governor of Ohio.

He was a civil service reformer who wanted to reduce the number of federal jobs. His main virtue was that he did not offend Radicals or reformers.

He promised to reject a second term for himself and called for reform of the civil service to eliminate cronyism.

The Democratic convention was pleasant. Samuel J. Tilden was nominated on the second ballot.

The campaign avoided controversial issues. Democrats highlighted the Republican scandals without strong ideological differences.

Republicans waved "the bloody shirt" and linked the Democrats to civil war and violence in the South. Robert G. Ingersol was the most celebrated Republican public speaker of the time.

Tilden won the election according to early returns. Tilden won 184 electoral votes, just 1 short of the total needed for victory, after he outpolled Hayes by almost 300,000 votes.

The election was decided by 19 disputed electoral votes from Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina.

The Democrats needed one of the challenged votes to claim victory. Democrats used violence to keep black voters away from the polls, while Republicans engaged in election fraud. The three states were governed by Republicans who appointed the election boards. The Democrats immediately challenged the results.

There were conflicting vote counts in all three states.

There was no solution for weeks. Congress appointed an electoral commission to settle the dispute. On March 1, 1877, the com mission voted in favor of Hayes. On the next day, the House ofRepresenta tives voted to make Hayes president.

Tilden didn't protest the decision.

Key southern Democrats defected to the Republicans in order to win the election in the Era of Reconstruction 1865-1877. The Republicans promised that if they named him presi dent, he would remove the last federal troops from the South.

Others were sad to see him go. T. Jefferson Martin spoke for many African Americans when he wrote Grant, "As a colored man I feel in duty bound to return you my greatful and sincere thanks, for your firm, steadfast, and successful administrations of our country, both as military chieftain and civil."

After July, the House of Representatives refused to fund federal troops in the South, and the Republican governments withdrew their soldiers from Louisiana and South Carolina. In the con gressional elections of 1878, he admitted that the balloting in southern states was corrupted by violence of the most atrocious character, but he was not about to send federal troops again.

Federal protection of black civil rights in the South fell over the next thirty years. New white state governments abolished the "carpetbaggers, scalawags, and blacks" and cut spending.

The Civil War had nothing to do with slavery and everything to do with a noble defense of states' rights and the southern homeland against the Republican party. The loyal and faithful slaves in the South were "contented with their lot" in 1861 according to Jefferson Davis.

Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson were idealized in the Lost Cause myth as chivalrous pil ars of southern virtue who fought bravely and ethical against far larger.

Scores of monuments and memorial were erected to honor Confederate leaders.

The col apse of Congressional Reconstruction had tragic conse quences, as the white South aggressively renewed traditional patterns of discrimination against African Americans.

Congressional Reconstruction left an enduring legacy with the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments.

Reconstruction's experiment in interracial democracy created the essential constitutional foundation for future advances in the quest for equality and civil rights for women and other minority groups, if it failed to provide true social equality or substantial economic opportunities for African Americans.

The states were responsible for citizens' rights until the Reconstruction era. Thanks to the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, blacks gained equal rights, and the federal government assumed responsibility for ensuring that states treated blacks equally. After a hundred years, the cause of civil rights would once again be accepted by the federal government.

Andrew Johnson, Lincoln's successor, wanted a lighter plan for Reconstruction. The Military Reconstruction Act used federal troops to enforce voting and civil rights for African Americans.

Many African Americans served as elected officials. Along with white southern Republicans and northern carpetbaggers, they worked to rebuild the southern economy.

The Four teenth and Fifteenth Amendments created the essential foundation for future advances in civil rights, but the Southern state governments quickly renewed long- standing patterns of discrimination against African Americans.

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The defeat of the Confederacy in 1865 restored the Union and helped accelerate America's transformation into an agricultural empire and an industrial powerhouse.

The regional conflicts of the prewar era were brought to an end by a stronger sense of nationalism. During and after the Civil War, the Republican- led Congress pushed through legislation to promote industrial and commercial development and western expansion at the same time that it was "reconstructing" the former Confederate states.

Food production and exports went up.

Railroads created a web of economic development. The relocation of Native Americans onto reservations and the reckless exploitation of the conti nent's natural resources tarnished the progress.

Huge corporations began to dominate the economy due to innovations in mass production and mass marketing. The process of industrial development controls us all because we are all in it.

The late 19th century American life was powered by the mushrooming industrial cities. Hamlin Garland declared that this is the age of cities. Rural life was affected by the transition from an economy made up of mostly small local and regional businesses to one dominated by large- scale national and international corporations.

The "simple, pastoral" America was reported to be gone as early as 1869. The Jeffersonian ideal of America as a nation of small farms had been displaced by the rush of railroads and business.

She exaggerated. During the last quarter of the 19th century, social unrest and political revolts were caused by the new forces of the national mar ketplace and the traditional folkways of small- scale family farming.

During the 1890s, there was a clash between tradition and modernity, sleepy farm vil ages and bustling cities.

The 1896 presidential campaign was transformed by a deep economic depression, political activism by farmers, and violent conflicts between industrial workers and employers.

The Republican candidate, William McKinley, talked about modern urban and industrial values. The nominee of the Democratic and the Populist parties was an eloquent defender of America's rural past. McKinley's victory was a turning point in American history. By 1900, the United States had emerged as one of the world's greatest industrial powers, and it would assume a new lead ership role in world affairs.

Steelworkers work at Andrew Carnegie's steel mill in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

The Civil War provided a boost to the northern economy. The need to supply the Union armies with shoes, boots, uniforms, weapons, supplies, food, wagons, and railroads ushered in an era of unprecedented industrial development. Large scale businesses were favored by the scope of the war.

The number of manufacturing companies in the United States doubled during the war.

The process of mass- producing mountains of goods for the war effort gave a widened scope to the ideas of leading capitalists.

America experienced rapid growth between the end of the war and 1900. There were no industrial corporations listed on the New York Stock Exchange after the Civil War ended. Hundreds of thousands of managers, clerks, and workers were employed by dozens of them by 1900.

The class structure and lives of women changed in the late 19th century.

Assess the efforts of workers to organize unions.