White supremacy
The South's White leaders, who held power in the immediate post-bellum era before the vote was granted to the freedmen, renounced secession and slavery, but not White supremacy. People who had previously held power were angered in 1867 when new elections were held. New Republican lawmakers were elected by a coalition of White Unionists, freedmen and Northerners who had settled in the South. Some leaders in the South tried to accommodate new conditions.