Immediately following the Civil War President Lincoln created a working Reconstruction plan. In Howard Zinn's renowned book, he tells of how blacks were allowed to vote, elect other blacks to political offices and receive an education. Unfortunately, this didn't last. After both Lincoln's and President Johnson's reconstruction plans failed to actually reconstruct the US after the Civil War, Congress felt as though they should step in. The plan they had included protecting the rights of the freedmen, ratifying the Fourteenth Amendment, and separating the former Confederacy into five military districts. While the basis of these was set, Congress' reconstruction efforts failed because the southerners didn't want to return to the Union, the freedmen weren't actually free, and groups like the Ku Klux Klan were unable to be stopped from persecuting the blacks.
             The central idea of Reconstruction was to reinstate the southerners into the Union. But how do you make men who left want to return after years of despising the North? Lincoln was faced with this very dilemma and thus set his own reconstruction plan that required just 10% of the southerners in any certain state to swear loyalty to the Union in order to be reinstated. But as mentioned before, Lincoln's Ten Percent Plan didn't work. The hate for the North was stronger than he expected. A confederate song popularized during the post-war era, which included lyrics that proclaimed, "...For this 'Fair Land of Freedom,' I do not give a dam..." It continued on stating how they only wished they'd won. The military districts set up in the South didn't help the situation as southerners felt as though they were being spied on. Without a want to return to the Union, Congress' own efforts came short of successful.
             Oddly enough, the reluctance of the southerners to accept reconstruction was the ...