Tattered Remains: System of Sharecropping
At first, the Freedman's Bureau grants land from abandoned plantations to thousands of black families, but the "gift" is only temporary as most of the land is returned to its former owners. Northerners assume that a free labor system will emerge in ...
Tattered Remains: Obstruction of Voting Rights for Southern Blacks
Few white Southerners ever accept the idea of racial equality. The fact that former slaves acquire legal and political rights is the result of federal support which all but vanishes after federal troops withdraw in 1877. The Fifteenth Amendment that...
Tattered Remains: Southern Economy, The
In an effort to diversify the economy in the years after the Civil War, Southern industry does expand. However, new jobs in the Alabama steel industry or the textile industries in the Carolinas are generally limited to white workers. Some blacks do ...
Tattered Remains: Horror of Lynching, The
Lynching is a brutal form of oppression intended to silence, intimidate and terrorize African-Americans as well as a few other groups in the South that some whites believe must be kept in their place. The incidence of lynchings is greater in states ...
Tattered Remains: Emergence of the Ku Klux Klan
During the Grant administration interest in Reconstruction fades as the North becomes preoccupied with its own problems. Before Grant leaves office in 1876 Democrats redeem seven of he eleven former Confederate states. It is a setting in which terro...