Reference no: EM133344351

Assignment:

Below is an article I wrote based on Foner"s Reconstruction book. Is this accurate and what can be elaborated more?

Politics is played on a field of shifting sand. One would think that the Republicans would hold the field for the foreseeable future, but such was not the case. It seems like the cracks in the Republican domination appeared almost immediately.

Freedmen began exercising their political muscle in the form of political organizations like the Union League. This was also the time of the carpetbagger and 'scalawags.' The carpetbaggers supported efforts to modernize and democratize the South. The scalawags believed they could advance further working with Republicans than against them. This was a time of constantly shifting alliances, as southern Republicans attracted a broad combination of supporters - both black and white - each with overlapping but distinct political agendas.

Therefore, you see in the southern Republican state conventions the party being split into two distinct factions, the 'confiscation radicals' that wanted land redistribution and the moderates, who wanted white control that offered more to attract outside investors than to the locals.

The Reconstruction Act once again stirred freedmen's hopes for land distribution, something that neither Democrats nor Republicans in the north and south wanted. The northern Republicans had their own problems, two of the biggest being establishing a stable monetary policy and debating women suffrage. "Clearly, whatever Southern Republicans desired," notes Foner, "the party in the North remained unwilling to embrace the land issue."

As a result of Republican infighting, the fall 1867 elections saw big Republican gains in the South and big Democratic gains in the North and California. This was interpreted as a backlash against the extremism of the Radical Republicans.