Resistance to Reconstruction-Civil War and Reconstruction?

The debate over Reconstruction quickly became a political struggle between President Johnson and Republicans in Congress, who were angered by Johnson's leniency and by white Southern resistance. In 1866 Republicans passed a bill extending the existence of the Freedmen's Bureau, which had been created in 1865 to help African-Americans make the transition to freedom and also to deal with white refugees and abandoned farms. Johnson claimed that the Bureau was no longer necessary, and he vetoed the bill. Congress passed the bill over the president's veto. The Freedmen's Bureau experimented briefly with breaking up plantations and providing black Southerners forty acres and a mule, so that they could become self-supporting farmers. It also created nearly 4,000 schools in the South by 1870.

Some white Southerners complained bitterly that Northerners who traveled South during Reconstruction were carpetbaggers (a reference to the luggage in which these Northerners carried their possessions), who were meddling in Southern affairs. Other white Southerners cooperated with Reconstruction. Critics of Reconstruction called Southern supporters of Reconstruction scalawags.