Chapter 16: Reconstruction White southerners had lost their cause and their society was destroyed.

Defeat s hook their religious beliefs. But many other white southerners refused to accept their defeat as a divine judgment. Instead, some southerners, who viewed the wa r as a Lost Game, insisted, God had spared the South for a greater purpose. This view of the War would not allow the memory of the Civil War to die, and existed as a three-dimensional depiction of southern history. Most white southerners ap proached the great issues of freedom and reunification with unyielding views. Wh ite saw outside assistance to black southerners as an invasion. Black southerners had a quite different perspective on the Civil War an d Reconstruction seeing it as a great victory of freedom. In 1865, African Ameri cans hoped that their dreams of full citizenship might be realized. The first st ep Congress took beyond emancipation was to establish the Freedman s Bureau. The mul tipurpose agency provided social, educational, and economic services, advice, an d protection to former slaves. The Freedman s Bureau established 3,000 freedman s school s in the South, serving 150,000 men, women, and children. Within a decade, black literacy had risen above 30 percent. In January 1865, General William T. Sherman issued Field Order No.15, wh ich set aside a vast swath of abandoned land along the South Atlantic coast from Charleston to northern Florida for grants of up to 40 acres. By June 1865, abou t 40,000 former slaves had settled along the land in the southern coast. In 1866 , Congress passed the Southern Homestead Act, giving black people access to publ ic lands in 5 southern states. President Andrew Johnson mollified the order in S eptember 1865, returning confiscated land to its former owners. By the late 1870 s, most former in the rural South had been drawn to a new labor system called sh arecropping. After the war, African Americans moved to cities to find families, seek work, escape the supervision of farm life, or simply to test their right to move out. In addition to freedom, the church became a primary focus of African American life. After the Civil War the federal government had two challenges, supportin g the freedom of former slaves, and rejoining the Confederacy to the Union. In 1864, a group of Republicans created the Wade-Davis Bill, which required a major ity of the states prewar voters to pledge their loyalty to the Union and demand guarantees of black equality before the law, but Lincoln refused to sign the bil l. During Federal Reconstruction, the Civil Rights and fourteenth and fifteenth amendments were made. By 1870, white southerners were regaining control of the s tates. During this time some black leaders were raised to power in our governme nt. White southerners used racial violence through groups like the Ku Klux Klan. The North failed to enforce its laws and members of the Ku Klux Klan began to g row. Redeemers saved the South from black people, Republicans, and other enemies of the South . Southern Democrats called their victory redemption . They often used violenc t Congress was weak in trying to stop it. Congress responded to the violence wit h the Civil Rights Act of 1875. Reconstruction was not as successful as it could have been. Although in this tim e Congress had made the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendment, they did not enforce their laws. This cause most former slaves to be sharecroppers who were in deep debt. Reconstruction was a failed promise and racial equality would take years t o come.