The American Civil War considerably shaped Americana history and the following events. The different regions, the North and South, were differentiated on their ideological aspects. This is because the South was pro-slavery while the North was agitating for the freeing of slavery and the need for unification. 1865 marked the end of the civil war, and the North emerged victorious. This was a big blow for the Southern state because they would be required to relinquish most of their authority, for example, allowing enslaved people to be accessible as they wished (Volkow et al., 2014). This was marked by President Abraham Lincoln signing the less suffrage bill, which needed the release of all enslaved people and being treated as humans as they would any other race.

Later on, upon his assassination, his reconstruction plan was to be undertaken by his predecessor, Johnson, who, to some extent, failed to fully implement the reconstruction process the same way Abraham had envisioned it. Even though many initially enslaved people had been freed, the systems in place did not fully enable them to participate in the reconstruction process. Different states had enacted different bills and laws to prevent black people from fully being free in terms of their economy and political engagement in the reconstruction process. The most known were Mississippi and South Carolina, where the black codes dictated that the formerly enslaved people, black people had to have written proof of their employment for the preceding year earlier than January of the year. Failure to do so was subject to losing the salaries or any form of ownership (Ruef & Grigoryeva, 2018). Furthermore, they were subject to arrests if found engaging in any form of demonstration or picketing or even generally political ingenuity process.

By great length, Lincoln played a massive role in setting the pace toward the reconstruction and stabilization of the Americana economy after the war. Lincoln established a statutory plan through which the process of reconstruction would take place. First, he stated that 10% of all males from the confederate state were to swear their loyalty towards the new state that would be recognized through the unification progress. Secondly, he proposed recognition of the new states’ formational, which would be included in the e new federal systems, which would include the unification of all the states under one central rule and executive powers (William Archibald Dunning, 1877, pp. 200–218). Also, Lincoln set the pace of the reconstruction by demanding that for the unification or allowing the Confederate state to join the unification, they were to release and relinquish their slave rules and free the remaining enslaved Black people. Coupled with that, they were to amend the slave laws, which would set the pace for the new systems of free and transparent society where e everybody would be subjected to human treatment at all times.

Furthermore, to some extent, the Radical Republicans were justified in taking the route they had taken because they wanted to preserve their peace and authority. To understand where the radicals were coming from, one needs to go back to the initial events where the Confederate or Southern states had been solely responsible for the Civil war. It is in the innate nature of the political nature of any apolitical elite to preserve their power through having absolute authority and power over their minority group. Operating on this assumption, the Radicals Republicans needed to maintain their control of the house of representative and Congress by garnering the majority of the seats even if the unification was to go through (William Archibald Dunning, 1877, pp. 200–218). Moreover, the Radical Republicans saw Lincoln as a weak leader because of his fear of taking more stringent punishment toward the South because of their civil war provocations. By stringency, the South confederate state would have no otherwise but bow down to the demands of the Radical Republicans in terms of amending and freeing the enslaved people with whom they were still in possession even after the war.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

References

 

William Archibald Dunning. (1877). Reconstruction, Political and Economic, 1865-1877 (Vol. 22, pp. 200–218).

Ruef, M., & Angelina Grigoryeva. (2018). “Jim Crow, Ethnic Enclaves, and Status Attainment: Occupational Mobility among U.S. Blacks, 1880–1940”. American Journal of Sociology 124 (3): 814–859. doi:10.1086/701020.

Volkow, N., Baler, R., Compton, W., & Weiss, S. (2014). Adverse Health Effects of Marijuana Use. New England Journal Of Medicine, 370(23), 2219-2227. https://doi.org/10.1056/nejmra1402309