Editing Reconstruction era (section)

===Southern Democrats===
[[File:A Visit from the Old Mistress.jpg|thumb|[[Winslow Homer]]'s 1876 painting ''A Visit from the Old Mistress'']]
While Republican whites supported measures for black civil rights, other whites typically opposed these measures. Some supported armed attacks to suppress blacks. They self-consciously defended their own actions within the framework of a white American discourse of resistance against [[tyrannical]] government, and they broadly succeeded in convincing many fellow White citizens, says Steedman.<ref>{{cite journal |last=Steedman |first=Marek D. |date=Spring 2009 |title=Resistance, Rebirth, and Redemption: The Rhetoric of White Supremacy in Post-Civil War Louisiana |url=https://www.researchgate.net/publication/250202064 |journal=Historical Reflections |volume=35 |issue=1 |pages=97–113 |doi=10.3167/hrrh2009.350106}}</ref>

The opponents of Reconstruction formed state political parties, affiliated with the national Democratic Party and often named the "Conservative Party." They supported or tolerated violent [[paramilitary]] groups, such as the White League in Louisiana and the Red Shirts in Mississippi and the Carolinas, that assassinated and intimidated both Black and White Republican leaders at election time. Historian George C. Rable called such groups the "military arm of the Democratic Party". By the mid-1870s, the "conservatives" and Democrats had aligned with the national Democratic Party, which enthusiastically supported their cause even as the national Republican Party was losing interest in Southern affairs.{{Citation needed|date=June 2024}}

Historian [[Walter L. Fleming]], associated with the early 20th-century [[Dunning School]], describes the mounting anger of Southern Whites:<ref>{{Cite book |last=Fleming |first=Walter L. |url=https://archive.org/details/sequelofappomatt0032walt/ |title=The Sequel of Appomattox: A Chronicle of the Reunion of the States |date=1919 |publisher=Yale University Press |isbn=9780554271941 |series=Chronicles of America series |volume=32 |location=New Haven |page=21 |via=Archive.org}}</ref>
{{blockquote|1=The Negro troops, even at their best, were everywhere considered offensive by the native whites.... The Negro soldier, impudent by reason of his new freedom, his new uniform, and his new gun, was more than Southern temper could tranquilly bear, and race conflicts were frequent.}}

Often, these White Southerners identified as the "Conservative Party" or the "Democratic and Conservative Party" in order to distinguish themselves from the national Democratic Party and to obtain support from former Whigs. These parties sent delegates to the [[1868 Democratic National Convention]] and abandoned their separate names by 1873 or 1874.{{sfnp|Perman|1985|p=6}}

Most White members of both the planter and business class and common farmer class of the South opposed Reconstruction, Black civil rights and military rule and sought [[white supremacy]]. Democrats nominated some Blacks for political office and tried to entice other Blacks from the Republican side. When these attempts to combine with the Blacks failed, the planters joined the common farmers in simply trying to displace the Republican governments. The planters and their business allies dominated the self-styled "conservative" coalition that finally took control in the South. They were paternalistic toward the Blacks but feared they would use power to raise taxes and slow business development.{{sfnp|Williams|1946}}

Fleming described the first results of the insurgent movement as "good", and the later ones as "both good and bad". According to Fleming (1907), the KKK "quieted the Negroes, made life and property safer, gave protection to women, stopped burnings, forced the Radical leaders to be more moderate, made the Negroes work better, drove the worst of the Radical leaders from the country and started the whites on the way to gain political supremacy".{{sfnp|Fleming|1906–1907|loc=Vol. II, p. 328}} The evil result, Fleming said, was that lawless elements "made use of the organization as a cloak to cover their misdeeds&nbsp;... The lynching habits of today [1907] are largely due to conditions, social and legal, growing out of Reconstruction."{{sfnp|Fleming|1906–1907|loc=Vol. II, pp. 328–329}} Historians have noted that the peak of [[Lynching in the United States|lynchings]] took place near the turn of the century, decades after Reconstruction ended, as Whites were imposing Jim Crow laws and passing new state constitutions that disenfranchised the Blacks. The lynchings were used for intimidation and social control, with a frequency associated more with economic stresses and the settlement of sharecropper accounts at the end of the season, than for any other reason.

In 1917, [[Ellis Paxson Oberholtzer]] explained:{{sfnp|Oberholtzer|1917|p=485}}
{{blockquote|1=Outrages upon the former slaves in the South there were in plenty. Their sufferings were many. But white men, too, were victims of lawless violence, and in all portions of the North and the late "rebel" states. Not a political campaign passed without the exchange of bullets, the breaking of skulls with sticks and stones, the firing of rival club-houses. Republican clubs marched the streets of Philadelphia, amid revolver shots and brickbats, to save the Negroes from the "rebel" savages in Alabama.... The project to make voters out of black men was not so much for their social elevation as for the further punishment of the Southern white people—for the capture of offices for Radical scamps and the entrenchment of the Radical party in power for a long time to come in the South and in the country at large.}}

At election times, whites people engaged in increased violence in attempts to run Republicans out of office and suppress Black voting. The victims of this violence were overwhelmingly African American, as in the [[Colfax Massacre]] of 1873. After federal suppression of the Klan in the early 1870s, white insurgent groups tried to avoid open conflict with federal forces. In 1874, in the [[Battle of Liberty Place]], the White League entered New Orleans with 5,000 members and defeated the police and militia, to occupy federal offices for three days in an attempt to overturn the disputed government of [[William Pitt Kellogg]], but they retreated before federal troops reached the city. None was prosecuted. Their election-time tactics included violent intimidation of African American and Republican voters prior to elections, while avoiding conflict with the U.S. Army or the state militias and then withdrawing completely on election day. White supremacist violence continued in both the North and South; the White Liners movement to elect candidates dedicated to white supremacy reached as far as Ohio in 1875.{{sfnp|McFeely|2002|pp=420–422}}

Historian Daniel Byman argues that white supremacist violence played a key role in the failure of Reconstruction. White supremacist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) and the Red Shirts engaged in terroristic acts against Black voters and white Republicans. They used assassinations, violence, and economic means to undermine and devastate Reconstruction efforts. He estimates that perhaps tens of thousands of Black Americans were murdered during this period. Byman argues that the federal government's failure to enforce Reconstruction policies enabled these white supremacy groups. The federal government did not commit enough military resources, and this enabled white supremacist groups to consolidate power. Reconstruction culminated in the Compromise of 1877 and the rollback of Black political rights.<ref name=":4">{{Cite journal |last=Byman |first=Daniel |date=2021 |title=White Supremacy, Terrorism, and the Failure of Reconstruction in the United States |url=https://direct.mit.edu/isec/article/46/1/53/102853/White-Supremacy-Terrorism-and-the-Failure-of |journal=International Security |volume=46 |issue=1 |pages=53–103 |doi=10.1162/isec_a_00410 |via=MIT}}</ref>