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BOOK V Re,-sowing on the Prairies RRT TOWNERS were moved by two great drives-politics and town building. Along with earning their bread, politics for these men was serious business as well as their chief sport and amusement. But at the end of the Civil War, radical Northerners in control of Congress stripped them of their political rights and interfered with their unrestrained economic freedom. For nine years, from July 1865 to January 1874, the Era of Reconstruction in Texas, Fort Worth men would learn the meaning of imposed authority and would know the bitterness which rankles Americans forced to submit to a government not of their own making. Fort Towners did not permit their pent-up feelings to break out in open defiance. Their political sagacity saved them, and their ingenious methods of solving problems spared the town and county many distressing incidents experienced in East and South Texas during this same period. They would fret because of the works of the reconstructionists-the carpetbaggers, scalawags, Union men, and Republicans. Inwardly fuming , but committing their ways to the new laws from Washington, D.C., they set their minds to conform in order to hasten the day for their restoration to the nation's fold. ...

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