How Did Reconstruction Succeed

One of the most important questions in the late 1800s is how do you rebuild after the death of the one man who held the country together through a civil war, President Lincoln, and after the decimation of Southern infrastructure; much to the dismay of the Republican party, who controlled the politics at this time, the Reconstruction failed to accomplish its chief goal of promoting equality as the country fell back into its antebellum ways. In an effort to right the wrongs of the past, Republicans strove to address the varying definitions of freedom to promote equality. These definitions include: political freedom, meaning the right to have a say in government by voting and running for offices, religious freedom, the right to an education, which
fosters economic advancement and enables people to get involved with politics, the right to one’s own labor, which united the North, and the right to family, which former slaves were previously denied. To promote equality and met the varying definitions of freedom, the Freedmen’s Bureau was established, which increased to the ambiguous role of federal government to an unprecedented level. For a time the bureau made many advancements in education and health care, but ultimately betrayed its commitment to land reform.
Through what was later referred to as Radical Reconstruction, the Republican party made many achievements in the promotion of civil and political equality by means of civil rights legislation, measure to protect free labor, and strived for an equal distribution of public services and resources that blacks were previously denied. While it seemed that for a time the Reconstruction was accomplishing everything it set out to do with the Fourteenth Amendment, the Reconstruction Act, Fifteenth Amendment, and an increase in blacks holding office at the local, state, and federal levels, the Reconstruction was effective overthrown by the its Southern with opposition who blamed the corruption in the Grant administration, incompetence, high taxes and black supremacy as a reason for overthrowing the system. In reality their motives were not so pure, they hated the idea of racial equality and wanted to control labor in an effort to regain their antebellum status as society’s elite. Soon they began launching their reign of terror against any Republican that was a threat to white supremacy, not discriminating by
race. Murdering anyone who tried to register blacks to vote or have any say in the government, societies like the Ku Klux Klan went after white and black Republicans alike. One instance of these violent attacks was in Colfax, Louisiana in 1873, where they took the town with small cannons and killed hundreds of free blacks, even fifty who had surrendered. Although the Grant administration swiftly responded with the Enforcement Acts of 1870 and 1871 and the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which gave Grant the right to outlaw terrorist organizations and expanded federal control with the ability to take them over with the army. Quickly, Liberal Republicans like Horace Greeley took over blaming the corruption of Grant’s administration and thinking htat there was no need to intervene in Southern affairs, which led to a resurgence of racism, saying that blacks were inferior and should not have a say in government because it would only lead to corruption. Coupled with an economic depression and the two Supreme Court decision of Slaughterhouse and the United States v. Cruikshank, which rendered the Enforcement Acts useless, the 1874 rise of the Democratic group called the “Redeemers,” representing racist Southern whites who wanted to “redeem” the South from corruption, and the rise of Liberal Republicans led to a resurgence of racism, terror, and electoral fraud which swiftly ended the Reconstruction undoing almost all of the progress made in the era and making the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments null and void, for there was no equality to be seen, only the empty words of a lost era.