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The Union victory in the Civil War in 1865 may have given some 4 million slaves their freedom, but the process of rebuilding the South during the Reconstruction period (1865-1877) introduced a new set of significant challenges. Under the administration of President Andrew Johnson in 1865 and 1866, new southern state legislatures passed restrictive "black codes" to control the labor and behavior of former slaves and other African Americans. Outrage in the North over these codes eroded support for the approach known as Presidential Reconstruction and led to the triumph of the more radical wing of the Republican Party. During Radical Reconstruction, which began in 1867, newly enfranchised blacks gained a voice in government for the first time in American history, winning election to southern state legislatures and even to the U.S. Congress. In less than a decade, however, reactionary forces–including the Ku Klux Klan–would reverse the changes wrought by Radical Reconstruction in a violent backlash that restored white supremacy in the South.

Reconstruction was America's first experiment in interracial democracy for men. It tested the central philosophies and traditions of America's society and institutions. The Civil War entailed a dramatic expansion of the roles and responsibilities of the central government that resulted in the ratification of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution. These amendments made involuntary servitude a federal crime, created a new federal dimension of citizenship for all Americans, and sought to guarantee universal male suffrage. Once they were ratified, Congress was constitutionally empowered and obligated to protect and enforce them, sustaining the broad new powers and active role of the national government. The postwar period began with a series of fairly lenient Reconstruction plans put forth by presidents Lincoln and Johnson, who were both eager to see the former Confederacy returned to the Union with as much speed and as little vindictiveness as possible.

Skip ahead one hundred plus years and you see America stepping in to right the wrongs of others by taking out Saddam Hussein and freeing the Iraqi people. Then comes the time for reconstruction. We should be pretty good at this since we have done this before, right? Well, probably not. What happened in the South's reconstruction was not that different from Iraq's reconstruction attempt. We come in, win the war and then tell everybody to follow the new rules and to get along. Unfortunately, there are way to many reasons this will not work. Control is probably the main reason we keep running into trouble. Their are many groups who want to run things. These groups have very different agendas. Some want to capitalize on the opportunity for financial gain. Nobody wants to loose what they already have. These are all issues that the American South and the post war Iraq have in common.

http://www.history.com/topics/reconstruction
http://www.shmoop.com/reconstruction/summary.html