Reconstruction is the name given to the period between the end of the Civil War in 1877 when the last federal troops were pulled out of the South.
Many Southerners were enraged at the outcome of the war. Having suffered and bled and died to get out of the Union, they now found themselves back in it. Southerners recognized that they had to bow to the results of their loss, but did so with underlying resentment often bordering on hatred. Much ill feeling toward the North existed among the people who had stayed at home, especially in areas invaded by Sherman and others: wives, widows, orphans and those who had endured incredible hardships were particularly horrified to be back under federal control, ruled by their former enemies.
One example of events was the ratification of the fourteenth Amendment was eventually made a condition for states to be readmitted to the Union. The radicals continued to uphold their exclusion of Southern Congressmen on grounds that by excluding blacks from the political process, the Southern governments were not republican in form, which constituted a violation of the Constitution’s Article IV, Section 4.
Another event was the Reconstruction Act passed in March 2, 1867. It divided the former Confederate states into five military districts and declared that the existing state governments were provisional only. The states were required to call constitutional conventions with full manhood suffrage and to enroll blacks on voter rolls. They would then be required to ratify their new state constitutions as well as the Fourteenth Amendment; then and only then would their representatives be readmitted to Congress.
The KKK can be seen as another event during reconstruction. In the months following the end of the Civil War many whites carried out acts of random violence against blacks. In their frustration at having lost the war and suffered great loss of life and property, they made the former slaves scapegoats for what they had endured. The violence became more focused when the Ku Klux Klan was founded in December, 1865. The Klan and other white supremacy groups, such as the Knights of the White Camellia, the Red Shirts and the White League, were well underway by 1867. The target of the Klan was the Republican Party, both blacks and whites, as well as anyone who overtly assisted blacks in their quest for greater freedom and economic independence.
