Evaluate the effectiveness of methods of Southern resistance to Reconstruction.

Candidates will make an appraisal of the effectiveness of Southern methods of resistance to Reconstruction. This may be evaluated by several criteria, including the response to the Lincoln-Johnson plan as well as the response to the plan of the Radical Republicans. Methods considered may include those that applied political, economic and social resistance as well as the use of terror. Issues that may be developed include, but are not limited to, the use of intimidation and force by terrorist organizations, such as the Ku Klux Klan, opposition to the Freedman’s Bureau and the plan to grant freedmen portions of confiscated and abandoned land, the use of “black codes” to restrict the civil rights of freedmen, the use of sharecropping, debt peonage and convict labour systems to control freedmen, and the use of grandfather clauses, poll taxes and literacy test to deny voting rights to freedmen.