Question

How did the white South's intransigence and President Johnson's political bungling open the way for congressional Republican program of military Reconstruction?

Answer 1

Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson adopted moderate positions to return the South to the Union as quickly as possible, while the Radical Republicans in Congress sought stronger measures to improve the rights of African-Americans, including the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. The United States. Lincoln's speeches show that he was inclined to support the freedom of vote of all freedmen, while Johnson opposed this.

The end of Reconstruction was a staggered process, and the period of republican control ended at different times in different states. With the Compromise of 1877, military intervention in southern politics ceased and Republican control collapsed in the last three state governments in the south. This was followed by a period that white southerners called "Redemption," during which state legislatures dominated by whites enacted Jim Crow laws and, beginning in 1890, deprived most African-Americans and many poor whites of one combination of constitutional amendments and electoral laws. The white memory of the Reconstruction of the Southern Democrats played an important role in the imposition of the white supremacy system of segregation, of second-class citizenship for African Americans who use laws known as Jim Crow laws.