exercise other rights.

In 1867, the federal government instituted Military Reconstruction, which carved the south (except Tennessee) into five military districts, each overseen by a Northern general. The southern states were required to pass the 14th Amendment and to create new state delegations and constitutions. The southern states were all permitted to rejoin the union by 1870.

By the 1870s, many northerners began to lose interest in Reconstruction for several reasons. First, some felt that they had done all they could to help former slaves with the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments and the establishment of the Freedman's Bureau and Military Reconstruction. Second, violence in the south conducted by the KKK and other forces was weakening the power of the Freedman's Bureau, which was terminated in the early 1870s. Finally, the Panic of 1873, a financial crisis, lessened northerners' interest in spending more federal funds to reconstruct the south. Reconstruction ended in 1877 with the election of President Hayes. The 1876 election, between the Democrat Samuel Tilden and the Republican Rutherford Hayes, was disputed. In exchange for allowing Hayes to be President, the Republicans agreed to withdraw federal troops from the south, ending Reconstruction. This agreement is known as the Compromise of 1877.

Feelings about Reconstruction varied to some degree in the South. Overall, it was greatly disliked and reviled by white Southerners, who felt that their defeat in the Civil War was being rubbed in their faces through further occupation by the federal army. Most of these Southerners also resented the new freedoms that the former slaves had just acquired. They did as much as they could to keep former slaves subjugated. This involved instituting Black Codes, keeping black people economically dependent on whites, and violently intimidating them, sometimes even murdering them.

While most white Southerners hated Reconstruction, many had some mixed feelings about it. Before the end of the Civil War, many Confederates feared that they would be severely punished as traitors should they be defeated. Under Presidential Reconstruction, they found that these fears were unneeded, as most were pardoned and had their property rights (minus their slaves) restored. While they still resented the conditions of their defeat, many Southerners, especially many former Confederate leaders, were grateful for this clemency.

Black Southerners found Reconstruction to be a mixed bag as well. The protections and services provided by the Freedman's Bureau helped prop them up and adjust to a new life of freedom. The presence of the federal army also served as protection in many places and instances. However, many also felt that they were being sold short. No one received the "forty acres and a mule" that General Sherman had promised. There was also little that the federal government could really do to protect them from the full force of racism and resentment which they faced on a daily basis. Ultimately, black Southerners were betrayed by Reconstruction when it abruptly ended in 1877, leaving them to essentially fend for themselves in a society that openly abused their rights and liberties.

Most Southerners were dead set against Reconstruction. They felt it was an attack on their whole way of life. They also believed that it was a violation of states' rights, an unwarranted interference by the victorious North in its affairs. The vast majority of Southerners had supported slavery and so didn't believe that the newly-freed slaves were entitled to civil rights protection. They found it highly offensive that people they regarded as racially inferior should be able to vote and participate in the democratic process as legislators.

In political and legal terms, there wasn't much that the South could do. Moreover, as it had just lost the Civil War it was in no position to rise up again in the foreseeable future. So challenges to Reconstruction took the form of illegal acts such as murder, intimidation, and property damage, with attacks on freed slaves and Northern officials becoming widespread throughout the South. The notorious white supremacist terror organization, the Ku Klux Klan, was responsible for many of these outrages and had been formed specifically to challenge Reconstruction and its implementation in the South.

I think it's safe to say they openly and bitterly resented it.  To them, Reconstruction meant being readmitted to a Union they had fought so hard to leave.  It meant being humiliated through occupation by, to them, a foreign army.  It meant slavery was gone for good, even if they creatively found ways to reinstate it in everything but name.  It meant watching African-Americans get elected to Congress from some of the most pro-slavery states in the South.

Because of this, they resisted in whatever ways they could.  The Klan was formed in 1865, first as a veterans organization, then as a terrorist group aimed at suppressing black freedoms and intimidating teachers in new black schools.  They acted as a twisted sort of social police force.

Mainly they passed local and state laws which went against the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments, forced freed slaves to live under Black Codes, and work in a system of sharecropping that closely resembled slavery.