[1] Generally, those who support racial hierarchies believe themselves to be part of the 'superior' race and base their supposed superiority on pseudo-biological, cultural or religious arguments.
Though many abolitionists had campaigned for slavery to be ended, there was much resistance from those who benefitted economically, as well as those who believed it was 'natural' for racially based reasons-these two groups were not mutually exclusive.
These views later paved the way for white Southern planters to keep racial conditions as close to slavery as legally possible after the Civil War during the Reconstruction era.
There were four million freedmen and most of them on the same plantation, doing the same work they did before emancipation, except as their work had been interrupted and changed by the upheaval of war....They had been freed practically with no land nor money, and, save in exceptional cases, without legal status, and without protection'[6]As policies in the United States changed after the Reconstruction period, elements within the white population tried to continue their domination of the races they deemed inferior.
Laws enacted after the 1880s prevented certain groups like Southern planters from continuing to affirm their mastery as black and white people became more legally equal.