While the country attempted to readjust to the new sociopolitical and socioeconomic landscape, out of the blight that followed The Civil War emerged a period of upheaval characterized by partisanship and corruption. Reconstruction, The North’s attempts to re-absorb The South while protecting the rights of blacks, was distinguished by intermittent successes overshadowed by ultimate failure. Laws that extended suffrage to black voters were coupled with laws that disenfranchised varying (often large) percentages of the white Southern population, a policy enforced by Union troops stationed in the former Confederate States. The political machine was born. Republican partisans and opportunists, many of whom abused positions of power for personal gain, were the benefactors of political arm twisting. Where the values of civil reformers overlapped with the interests of political operators, gains were made to advance civil rights legislation, extend public education and grant suffrage to black Americans, yet many of these reforms were dismantled by vindictive Southern politicians called “Redeemers.” The most lasting contribution of Republican idealism during Reconstruction were the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments, which extended citizenship to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States” and guaranteed those persons the vote, yet in spite of these provisions, state legislatures across The South would disenfranchise black Americans and segregate schools and communities until 1965.
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