Reuters: How slaveholding families reasserted themselves after the Civil War

One fifth of the U.S. political elite are direct descendants of slaveholders. In examining the lineages of three current members of Congress, Reuters focused on how their forebears reclaimed family wealth and power in the decades following the post-Civil War Reconstruction Era. It was a time when the old South sought to reassert itself socially and politically, stripping away the rights Black people had gained during Reconstruction before federal troops withdrew from the region in 1877. -- Article