Page 403 - American Stories, A History of the United States

16.1 Watch the Video The Promise and Failure of Reconstruction

16.2

16.3

16.4

aFRICan ameRICan VotInG The First Vote, drawn by A. H. Ward for Harper’s Weekly, November 16, 1867.

Acts. A secondary aim was to enfranchise African Americans in northern states that
still denied them the vote.
Many feminists were bitter that the amendment did not extend the vote to women.
A militant wing of the women’s rights movement, led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and
Susan B. Anthony, was so angered that the Constitution was being amended to, in
effect, make gender a qualification for voting that they campaigned against ratification
of the amendment. Other feminists led by Lucy Stone supported the amendment, say-
ing this was “the Negro’s hour” and that women could afford to wait a few years for
the vote. This disagreement divided the woman suffrage movement for a generation.
The Grant administration was charged with enforcing the amendment and pro-
Quick Check tecting black men’s voting rights in the reconstructed states. Since survival of the
What did the Fifteenth Amendment Republican regimes depended on African American support, political partisanship
provide, and who was left out of its dictated federal action, even though the North’s emotional and ideological commit-
protections?
ment to black citizenship was waning.

A Reign of terror Against Blacks
Ku Klux Klan A secret terrorist Between 1868 and 1872, the Ku Klux Klan and other secret societies bent on restoring
society first organized in tennessee white supremacy by intimidating blacks who sought to exercise their political rights
in 1866. the original Klan’s goals and were the main threat to Republican regimes. Founded in Tennessee in 1866, the
were to disfranchise African
Americans, stop Reconstruction, Klan spread rapidly, adopting lawless and brutal tactics. A grassroots vigilante move-
and restore the prewar social order ment, not a centralized conspiracy, the Klan thrived on local initiative and support
of the South. the Ku Klux Klan from whites of all social classes. Its secrecy, decentralization, popular support, and
re-formed in the twentieth century ruthlessness made it difficult to suppress. As soon as blacks had been granted the right
to promote white supremacy and to vote, hooded “night riders” began to visit the cabins of active Republicans. Some
combat aliens, Catholics, and Jews. victims were only threatened. Others were whipped or murdered.

370