Industrialization in Postbellum America
The postbellum period of American history lasted from 1865 until 1900 and can be viewed as the story of three separate sections of post-Civil War America: The Reconstruction of the South, the Closing of the West and the Gilded Age in the Northeast. In the South, Reconstruction began in 1865 when the former Confederate states entered into a period of 12 years of Federal Government control [1] . Twelve years later in 1877, Federal Troops were withdrawn, and the former slaves fell under a political system known as Jim Crow. During this Jim Crow period, the Klu Klux Klan operated as the enforcer of Democratic Party policies that restricted the legal rights of Blacks. [2] Without the protection of Federal Troops, Blacks were relegated to a second-class status. Many former slaves were left with sharecropping as their only means of supporting their families. Sharecropping was an economic system where...