"But Booth’s assassination of Lincoln was also part of a larger plot to throw the North into chaos. Thus the killing could be called equal parts terrorism and tyrannicide. What is clear is that Lincoln died a martyr to many Northerners and that his death complicated efforts to heal the Union. What followed has become known as Reconstruction, the period from 1865 to 1877 during which Northern Republicans, driven by anger over Lincoln’s assassination and the need to make wartime sacrifices meaningful, sought to “reconstruct” the South as an egalitarian society. Among historians, it is now commonly understood as nothing less than a revolution. Therefore the violence of the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacists was essentially a counterrevolution, one of the best historical examples of terrorism used in a fundamentally “conservative” cause, that is, with the goal of halting radical change. Most disturbingly, Reconstruction-era terrorism helped facilitate its perpetrators’ victory."