Georgia during Reconstruction
[3] Shortly after Sherman issued his order, Congressional leaders convinced President Lincoln to establish the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands in March 1865.
Over the objections of Freedmen's Bureau chief General Oliver O. Howard, President Andrew Johnson revoked Sherman's directive in the fall of 1865, after the war had ended, returning these lands to the planters who had previously owned them, and expelling their new Black farmers.
On Georgia's farms and plantations, wartime destruction, the inability to maintain a labor force without slavery, and miserable weather had a disastrous effect on agricultural production and the regional economy.
[1] After the war, new railroad lines and commercial fertilizers created conditions that spurred increased cotton production in Georgia's upcountry, but coastal rice plantations never recovered.
Voters repudiated most Unionist candidates, electing to office many ex-Confederates, although several of these – including the new governor, former Whig Charles J. Jenkins – initially opposed secession.
Neither Stephens or Johnson, nor any of Georgia's newly-selected U.S. House delegation, were inaugurated or allowed to take their seats, as the federal government, at the time, refused to accept into the congregation persons implicated so heavily with the Confederacy's secession and rebellion, or to enable them to wield federal-level political influence.
[citation needed] Andrew Johnson's decision in August 1866 to restore the former Confederate states to the Union was criticized by the Radical Republicans in Congress, who, in March 1867, passed the First Reconstruction Act, placing the South under military occupation.
Radical Republicans also passed an ironclad oath which prevented ex-Confederates from voting or holding office, replacing them with a coalition of freedmen, carpetbaggers, and scalawags, mostly former Whigs who had opposed secession.
[5] In July 1868, Georgia was readmitted to the Union, the newly elected General Assembly ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, and a Republican governor, New York native Rufus Bullock, was inaugurated.
In March 1869 Governor Bullock, hoping to prolong Reconstruction, "engineered" Georgia's refusal to ratify the Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution,[1] which gave Black American men the right to vote.
Akerman, though born in the North, moved to Georgia after college and owned slaves; he fought for the Confederacy and became a scalawag during Reconstruction, speaking out for civil rights for Blacks.
To bolster Akerman's investigation, President Grant sent in Secret Service agents from the Justice Department to infiltrate the Klan to gather evidence for prosecution.
Grant teamed Akerman up with another reformer in 1870, a native Kentuckian, the first Solicitor General Benjamin Bristow, and the duo went on to prosecute thousands of Klan members and brought a brief quiet period of two years (1870–1872) in the turbulent Reconstruction era.
His efforts to prolong military rule caused considerable divisions in the states party, while black politicians complained that they did not receive an adequate share of patronage.
With the voting restrictions against former Confederates removed, Democrat and ex-Confederate Colonel James Milton Smith was elected to complete Bullock's term.
