Historians describe white Southerners' varied responses to emancipation and the issue of civil rights, and describe the thinking that gave rise to white supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan during Reconstruction.
How did Southern resistance to black freedom play out after the Civil War?
Drew Gilpin Faust: Mary Lee of Winchester [Virginia] says at the end of the war, "Political reconstruction is inevitable now, but social reconstruction, we have in our hands and we can prevent." And I think that's such an extraordinary insight on her part, and so predictive of much of what happens in the months and years that follow her remark. I think what she means is that Congress is going to do certain things, but there's almost a kind of guerrilla warfare of the domestic, of the local, of people just refusing to let society change in the ways that the architects of freedom in the North might hope for, in the ways that the slaves, the freed slaves, might themselves within the South hope for.
