"The real issue in this period, as in the war itself, was the question of federal authority. Having strengthened it beyond imagination to win the war, the Republicans, led by Charles Sumner in the Senate, one of the few real heroes of the era, knew they must keep it strong to complete the work of the war. Only the continued occupation of the South by federal troops, even after states were re-admitted to the Union, gave the black citizenry and white Republicans (of which there were some!) any chance of exercising their franchise and securing their lives and property. The Ku Klux Klan was, very simply, a terrorist organization dedicated to re-imposing white rule by force, something it gradually managed to do. " DK
What he calls 'the work of the war' had not been the mandate of Lincoln when elected. Quite the contrary. Lincoln had actually campaigned on limited federal authority, even on the states' rights slavery issue. One can see that this had been a Kennedy fallacy broken promise.
Freeing the negro slaves during the war, and then giving them voting rights, and even faux political control as puppets of southern political offices, had never even been imagined as desirable by almost any white Americans either north or south.
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