There is a law in physics that seems to apply to history as well “to every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.” This was the case with the period surrounding the civil war, a period characterized by revolutions, social, physical, and political. The pure scale of the actions and reactions in this period were what made it so revolutionary. The secession of the southern states was a revolution or against the Union, the reaction to which was the Civil War and the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments. Reconstruction, when the North tried to determine how the South would be re-formed, was another action that prompted the opposite reaction by the Southerners to re-implement old practices, especially things like sharecropping or the forming
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During Military Reconstruction, blacks enjoyed the right to vote freely under the protection of the Northern takeover. However, it was not to last, the reconstruction fervor began to fade and . Sharecropping, a form of farming remarkably similar to serfdom which had started soon after the Civil War, was spreading like wildfire and pulling many freedmen back into labor, possibly even worse than before because now they had to pay for their own food etc. Groups Like the Ku Klux Klan, started in 1865, began to gain more and more popularity as the military control faded. They used scare tactics like lynchings to keep Freedmen from voting. Other tactics to try and keep Freedmen from the poles were subjecting them to ‘literary tests’ and saying that if your grandfather hadn 't been able to vote, neither could you. Slave codes were soon replaced by ‘Black Codes’, and so the south went through another social revolution, but this time they went backwards(Documents I & …show more content…
The war was fought on premises of keeping a nation whole. It soon also became about freeing the slaves completely, a revolutionary concept. Reconstruction tried to make them equal to whites, and only sort of worked. In the end all these revolutions went almost full-circle and we see the repercussions to this day. Even still, this revolution is moving forwards, and we strive towards knowing and accepting how, even though we may seem different, we are all beautifully diverse and amazingly similar in both minds and our
During Military Reconstruction, blacks enjoyed the right to vote freely under the protection of the Northern takeover. However, it was not to last, the reconstruction fervor began to fade and . Sharecropping, a form of farming remarkably similar to serfdom which had started soon after the Civil War, was spreading like wildfire and pulling many freedmen back into labor, possibly even worse than before because now they had to pay for their own food etc. Groups Like the Ku Klux Klan, started in 1865, began to gain more and more popularity as the military control faded. They used scare tactics like lynchings to keep Freedmen from voting. Other tactics to try and keep Freedmen from the poles were subjecting them to ‘literary tests’ and saying that if your grandfather hadn 't been able to vote, neither could you. Slave codes were soon replaced by ‘Black Codes’, and so the south went through another social revolution, but this time they went backwards(Documents I & …show more content…
The war was fought on premises of keeping a nation whole. It soon also became about freeing the slaves completely, a revolutionary concept. Reconstruction tried to make them equal to whites, and only sort of worked. In the end all these revolutions went almost full-circle and we see the repercussions to this day. Even still, this revolution is moving forwards, and we strive towards knowing and accepting how, even though we may seem different, we are all beautifully diverse and amazingly similar in both minds and our