Film Summary on Reconstruction

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Film Summary Reconstruction Reconstruction was America’s first experiment in interracial democracy for men. It tested the central philosophies and traditions of America’s society and institutions. The civil war entailed a dramatic expansion of roles and responsibilities of the central government that resulted in the ratification of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the constitution. These amendments made involuntary servitude a federal crime. That created a new federal dimension of citizenship for all Americans, and sought to guarantee universal male suffrage. Once they were ratified, congress was constitutionally empowered and obligated to protest and enforce them, sustaining the broad new powers and active role of the government. The post war period began with a series of fairly lenient Reconstruction plans put forth by presidents Lincoln and Johnson, who were both eager to see former confederacy returned to the union with as much speed and as little vindictiveness as possible. As the ineffectiveness of Reconstruction became apparent in the face of blatant violations of the freed peoples constitutional rights and liberties, northern voters elected republicans to congress by a landslide, there providing a mandate for the republicans to take the job of putting the union back together again. They were deemed radical by subsequent historians because they insisted that blacks be protected in their new found rights. When white southerner’s intransigence followed the nation’s first civil rights act, Congress passed the Ku Klux Klan act. This gave federal authorities jurisdiction over both states and individuals who tried to deprive Freedmen and women of their new found rights. Never before had the federal intervened so force fully and directly on behalf of its citizens, let alone it’s most constellated and impoverished minority. Yet even
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