ABSTRACT
Race, or the ideologies and practices of racial subordination in the South, has remained a fertile topic for exploration for historians of the past generation. The suffrage requirements for freedmen and disqualifications for former Confederates would force a political revolution in the South. Americans North and South began the process of reunion, and the urgent desire for successful reintegration was evident in President Lincoln's lenient early plans for Reconstruction as well as his and General Grant's generous initial terms to the defeated rebels and their leaders. The incompetence of President Andrew Johnson and his "restorationist" policies and the South's obstinacy convinced northern Republicans that the spirit of rebellion had to be thoroughly crushed for the survival of the nation, and that a more thoroughgoing reconstruction was in order. The (white) North and South had reconciled over the war; those divisions were replaced by an emphasis on the tragic anomaly of Reconstruction and the "disastrous" racial revolution it engendered.
