The nation
achieved some of the goals. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments passed, thus
ending slavery and giving African Americans both citizenship and suffrage. As for Lincoln's goal
of peace, there were no major Confederate trials for treason, and most of the former Confederate
soldiers were pardoned. The nation was reunited with the end of militaryin 1877 though the South
would continue to lag behind the rest of the nation economically.
Douglass
believed in equality for African Americans. Terrorist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan sprang up
in the South in order to maintain the racial status quo. Though Grant pursued the Klan, many
localities still banned travel by blacks and arrested them in disproportionate numbers in order
to work in chain gangs.
The Freedmen's Bureau, an organization designed to
help poor blacks as well as white refugees of the war, was never fully funded by the
Reconstruction presidents. The former planters still managed to hold power through sharecroppers
where they used a surplus of unskilled labor and kept them tied to the land by debt. Segregation
would ultimately be the law of the land with the Supreme Court's Plessy v. Ferguson
ruling. This case only legalized what had been going on in the South for yearsthe
creation of separate facilities for whites and blacks.
In a sense, Lincoln's
plan was realized with the ending of slavery and no further civil wars. One does not know if
Lincoln's view on races would have evolved or if he would have had disagreements with a Radical
Republican Congress, as he was tragically assassinated days after Lee's surrender. Douglass's
view of greater equality and opportunities would not be realized during the Reconstruction era.
The use of segregation, poll taxes, and other laws at the local and state levels maintained the
racial status quo in the South for years after Reconstruction.
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