Reconstruction: a Succes or Failure

The Reconstruction was a success in that it restored the United States as a unified nation by 1877, all of the former Confederate states had drafted new constitutions, acknowledged the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, and pledged their loyalty to the U.S. government. Secondly, they wanted to help all of the near four million slaves who were now free men after the war. They felt these “men” needed protection, and it was their job to do so. The Reconstruction Act finally passed by congress had two main points to it. First, troops were required to move in and take up residence in the confederate states of the south. Secondly, any state that wanted back into the union was only allowed to do so when and if they changed their 14th amendment. They had to agree that all men born in the U.S. were citizens, and because of that they were guaranteed equal treatment by the law. Later, in 1870, black men were also granted the vote…but this would come later.

However, Reconstruction failed by most other measures: Radical Republican legislation ultimately failed to protect former slaves from white persecution and failed to engender fundamental changes to the social fabric of the South. When President Rutherford B. Hayes removed federal troops from the South in 1877, former Confederate officials and slave owners almost immediately returned to power. With the support of a conservative Supreme Court, these newly empowered white southern politicians passed black codes, voter qualifications, and other anti-progressive legislation to reverse the rights that blacks had gained during Radical Reconstruction. The U.S. Supreme Court bolstered this anti-progressive movement with decisions in the Slaughterhouse Cases, the Civil Rights Cases, and United States v. Cruikshank that effectively repealed the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and the Civil Rights Act of 1875. Meanwhile, the sharecropping system essentially a legal form of slavery that kept blacks tied to land...