The idea of reconstruction after the american civil war in the 19th century

Listen to a recorded reading of this page: Your browser does not support the audio element. Hayes in The telegraph made possible instantaneous communication between generals and between the battlefield and home front.

Having lost their enormous investment in slaves, white planters had minimal capital to pay freedmen workers to bring in crops. The moderates in Congress wanted virtually all of them to vote, but the Radicals resisted. As a reward, the pro-war Southern Democrat was appointed as military governor of Tennessee, and later asked to join Abraham Lincoln's ticket as vice-presidential candidate.

Northern victory in the Civil War decided the fate of the Union and of slavery, but posed numerous problems. Although the military conflict had ended, Reconstruction was in many ways still a war. No one knows how many temporarily lost the vote, but one estimate was that it was as high as 10, to 15, out of a total white population of roughly eight million.

Army except in Tennessee, where anti-Johnson Republicans were already in control.

They moved to impeach Johnson because of his constant attempts to thwart Radical Reconstruction measures, by using the Tenure of Office Act. What was to be the place of freed blacks in the South? More recently, in the wake of the civil rights revolution of the s, scholars have taken a far more sympathetic approach to Reconstruction, viewing it as an effort, noble if flawed, to create interracial democracy in the South.