<P> The end of Reconstruction marked the end of the brief period of civil rights and civil liberties for African Americans in the South, where most lived . Reconstruction caused permanent resentment, distrust, and cynicism among white Southerners toward the federal government, and helped create the "Solid South," which typically voted for the (then -) socially conservative Democrats for all local, state, and national offices . White supremacists created a segregated society through "Jim Crow Laws" that made blacks second - class citizens with very little political power or public voice . The white elites (called the "Redeemers"--the southern wing of the "Bourbon Democrats") were in firm political and economic control of the south until the rise of the Populist movement in the 1890s . Local law enforcement was weak in rural areas, allowing outraged mobs to use lynching to redress alleged - but - often - unproven crimes charged to blacks . </P> <P> Historians' interpretations of the Radical Republicans have dramatically shifted over the years, from the pre-1950 view of them as tools of big business motivated by partisanship and hatred of the white South, to the perspective of the neoabolitionists of the 1950s and afterwards, who applauded their efforts to give equal rights to the freed slaves . </P> <P> In the South itself the interpretation of the tumultuous 1860s differed sharply by race . Americans often interpreted great events in religious terms . Historian Wilson Fallin contrasts the interpretation of Civil War and Reconstruction in white versus black using Baptist sermons in Alabama . White preachers expressed the view that: </P> <Dl> <Dd> God had chastised them and given them a special mission--to maintain orthodoxy, strict Biblicism, personal piety, and traditional race relations . Slavery, they insisted, had not been sinful . Rather, emancipation was a historical tragedy and the end of Reconstruction was a clear sign of God's favor . </Dd> </Dl>

Why did the us experience a transformation during the period 1865 to 1900