RADICAL RECONSTRUCTION REINFORCED

With the election of Grant, Radical Republicans finally had an ally in the White House. In March of 1870 the final Reconstruction amendment was ratified. The Fifteenth Amendment stated that no American could be denied the right to vote “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” Elections in the South in 1870 were regulated by federal troops stationed there. In these elections thousands of Southern blacks voted for the first time; predictably, many Southern whites did not vote in these elections and viewed the entire process with disgust.

In the 1870 elections nearly 630 blacks were elected as representatives in Southern state legislatures. Sixteen blacks were elected to Congress, one to the United States Senate, and a black, P.B.S. Pinchback, was elected governor of Louisiana.

It would be impossible to overstate the resentment with which many Southern whites viewed the entire Reconstruction process. Reconstruction was oftentimes blamed on carpetbaggers, who were Northerners who moved to the South during the Reconstruction period, or on scalawags, a Southern term for white Southern Republicans.

Groups such as the Ku Klux Klan (founded in Tennessee in 1866) fueled white resentment into violence against blacks and their “outside” supporters in the South. The Klan’s activities ranged from trying to intimidate blacks at polling places to the burning of crosses to torture and murder. Various federal laws were passed to limit the activities of the Klan, with thousands of members being arrested. The group and its activities persisted, however.