Unfortunately, infighting within the Republican Party prevented the Radical Republicans from successfully implementing their own Reconstruction policies. A split within the Republican Party was most notably brought to light during the impeachment trial of President Johnson, when several Republicans voted for Johnson's acquittal.
Radical Republicans' views differed from the mainstream party line, which held views similar to those held by their former figurehead Abraham Lincoln. Unlike the more moderate stream of Republicans, the Radical Republicans favored equal rights for African-Americans and foresaw the potential disaster of neglecting to care for the needs of liberated slaves. The Reconstruction policies championed by Radical Republicans included the 14th Amendment, which offered African-Americans full citizen status and subsequently granted former slaves equal protection under the law. Opposed to the 13th Amendment, most former Confederates could not stomach the 14th. Moreover, some Radical Republicans suggested the confiscation of all Southern plantations, to divide land among former slaves, one of the most radical of all the Republican Reconstruction ideas ("Radical Republicans").
Southern states expressed vehement opposition to the Fourteenth Amendment. Their refusal to ratify the 14th Amendment proved not only an affront to civil rights but also to the Union. As a result of their stubborn dismissal of the constitutional amendment, Radical Republicans in Congress successfully enacted the Reconstruction Acts. The Reconstruction Acts, which divided the former Confederacy into five militarized zones controlled by the federal government, further antagonized Southern leaders who had resented Washington's political pressure before the Civil War. Southerners clung to slavery partly on principle, to assert independence from the federal government. The Reconstruction Acts were therefore viewed as a direct insult to the rights of the states to...
The Black Arts Era is characterized by powerful voices such as that of Ishmael Reed or Amiri Baraka. In his poem Black Art, Amiri Baraka potently draws attention to the need for a self-conscious black poetry which would accentuate intentionally all the features specific to the African-American culture. The harsh tone of the poem at the beginning and the almost raging, ferocious rhythm indicate the desire to awaken the spirit
" (Fort, 1) To an extent, freedom could not be experienced until it was understood. And yet, the utopian multiracialism that we might like to attribute to the post Civil War era would hardly be accurate. Instead, the period of Reconstruction bred hardship for the nation, for the South and especially for freed slaves. As Fountain Hughes tells in his narrative, "we had no home, you know. We was jus' turned
Gone with the Wind as a literature of witness to forced labor Gone with the Wind, a story of white Southern resilience by Margaret Mitchell, which greatly appealed to readers of the Depression-era, depicted slavery as a world of faithful slaves and lenient masters. The tale also criticized freed individuals who tried to practice their citizenship rights. Since Gone with the Wind embraced most of the same rhetoric as purportedly non-fiction
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