Question

How did white southerners respond to radical Reconstruction?

Answer 1

Hint: Reconstruction (1865-1877), the tumultuous period after the Civil War, was the attempt to reintegrate the Confederacy of Southern States and 4 million newly-freed persons into the United States.

Complete answer: In 1865 and 1866, under President Andrew Johnson's presidency who was a Democrat and ran on the National Union ticket with Lincoln, came to power as the Civil War ended. He believed that new southern state legislatures introduced oppressive "black codes" to govern the work and conduct of former enslaved individuals and other African Americans. Outrage in the North over these codes weakened support for the strategy known as" Presidential Restoration" and led the Republican Party's more radical wing to victory. For the first time in the American history, during Progressive Reconstruction, which began with the passage of the" Reconstruction Act of 1867", newly favoured Black people, through this the blacks gained a voice in government, led to winning elections to southern state legislatures and even the U.S. Congress. In less than a decade, however, a violent backlash took place that restored white supremacy in the South, including conservative movements like the Ku Klux Klan, which reversed the reforms brought about by Progressive Reconstruction. Blacks were entitled to the same political rights and opportunities as whites, the Radical Republicans claimed. They also believed that for their actions in the Civil War, the Confederate leaders should be prosecuted.

Note: The 1867 Restoration Acts set out the mechanism for the readmission into the Union of Southern States. The Fourteenth Amendment (1868) established national citizenship for former slaves, and the Fifteenth Amendment (1870) extended the right to vote to black men.