her Clause.” This clause established voting and property qualifications by not allowing those whose grandfathers were ineligible to vote before 1867. The total number of eligible voters in the South declined rapidly as a result. The divisions that were common under the institution of slavery were now also common under American law. Court rulings as a result of the Civil Rights Act of 1875 did not help. The courts believed that government could not control private individuals over matters of race, so the federal government could not force a shop or bar owner to desegregate. This helped to establish the principle of “separate-but-equal” which was upheld by later rulings in cases such as “Plessy v. Ferguson.” After the advent of the ‘separate-but-equal’ doctrine America began to see the spread of what were known as “Jim Crow laws.” Freedmen were not only discriminated against by court rulings. Southern whites both rich and poor were severely opposed to emancipation. The poor feared the competition in the labor force, and the rich encouraged this attitude to keep a strong division in the blacks and the whites. In the early years after Reconstruction there was some violence towards blacks, but as the years went on this violence increased. Terrorist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) arose to torment and commit violence against both African-Americans and strong Republicans. Frederick Douglas, a dominant Republican said "Rebellion has been subdued, slavery abolished, and peace proclaimed," he said, "and yet our work is not done...We are face to face with the same old enemy of liberty and progress.... The South today is a field of blood." The violence associated with racism was a horrible problem. Although groups such as the KKK operated solely in the South, discrimination of a lesser sort was also prevalent in northern cities. At the end of the 18th century many whites used violence to s...
