Why is it important to
understand who killed
Reconstruction?

Northern victory in the Civil War was supposed to usher in a new nation. The slaughter of hundreds of thousands on the battlefields did not simply end slavery in America, it also created a new kind of national government designed to promote economic opportunity for everyone.

As Northerners struggled to fight and fund a war of unprecedented magnitude, they replaced a prewar system run by a handful of wealthy Southern slaveholders with a government “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” That new, popular government took firm root in the country after the war, as citizenship was extended and all men got the right to vote. Between 1860 and 1870, it seemed, a Second American Revolution had finally aligned the Constitution with the promise of the Declaration of Independence that all men were created equal.

It didn’t last.

A year after the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, many soured on the idea of popular government. They looked to the South, where an observer warned that a “proletariat Parliament” dominated by black men was ruining South Carolina, and to the North, where the rising power of workers made a popular magazine snarl that “the interference of ignorant labor with politics is dangerous to society.”

They concluded that not everyone should have a say in government. With this ideological shift, things changed fast. In 1875, the Supreme Court suggested that citizens could be denied voting rights so long as discrimination was not based on race. The next year, white voters took back the South.

Lincoln’s vision of a government of the people, by the people, and for the people had lasted only about a decade.

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