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Period: to
The civil war
Main social, political, and economic consequences of the Civil War on the southern U.S. after the surrender -
Political consequences
•new southern state legislatures passed restrictive “black codes”.
•After the war, many African-Americans started to be involved in politics.
• in 1868–the Civil Rights Act became the first major bill to become law over presidential veto.
• the South was divided into five military districts
• By 1870, all of the former Confederate states had been admitted to the Union,
• Southern blacks won election to southern state governments during this period. -
Social consequences
•4 million newly-freed slaves.
•After the war, the villages, cities and towns in the South were utterly destroyed.
•Civil Rights groups organized.
•The South’s first state-funded public school systems.
•The U.S. population nearly doubled between 1870 and 1900.
•Racism was still a potent force in both South and North.
•The Ku Klux Klan would reverse the changes wrought by Radical Reconstruction in a violent backlash. -
Economic consequences
•Confederate bonds and currency were now worthless.
•The plantation system was also destroyed and, in its place, the sharecropping system was introduced.
•From 1863 to 1899, manufacturing production rose by more than 800 percent.
•In 1874–after an economic depression plunged much of the South into poverty.
•In the South, a smaller industrial base, fewer rail lines, and an agricultural economy based upon slave labor made mobilization of resources more difficult.
