However, the ambition was held up when President Lincoln was shot in the Ford’s Theatre, Washington, D.C. on April 17, 1865, and died the next day.

After that, the South had been underwent reconstruction until 1877.

 

The reconstruction of the South was started under President Andrew Johnson.

Johnson, who was born in Tennessee and was an ex-Democratic Party member, restored lands, which were not forfeited by the Union, to planters in the South.

Moreover, former governors of the South came back to power under the President Johnson regime.

Helped by these political measures, they developed black codes in each one of the states.

These laws banned and limited African- American land ownership.

In this way, the Civil War brought in the termination of slavery but it did not promote the collapse of plantations.

 

Black Americans had become sharecroppers and tied down by owner’s land. 

This kind of situation continued until the Second World War.

The Reconstruction era of the South ended when the Compromise of 1877 was concluded.

 

In the Compromise, instead of the Southern Democratic Party recognizing the Northern Republican Rutherford Birchard Hayes as the winner of the presidential election, the North accepted the removal of all Federal troops from the former Confederate States.

In 1883, the Supreme Court ruled the Fourteenth Amendment, which gives assurance of civil rights for African-Americans, unconstitutional.

For its part, Mississippi in 1890 enacted a state law that stripped black people of civil rights.  

Louisiana and South Carolina followed these steps in 1895.

As a result of a Supreme Court decision in 1896 known as Plessy v. Ferguson, the doctrine of “separate but equal”, the idea that supports racial segregation in public accommodations, was established. The color discrimination which was established at this point existed as “Jim Crow” laws until the 1960’s.

Chapter Ⅱ will review the history of the blues and other African-American music in the South, and how the music changed with times in the black communities. 

To Be Continued