the reconstruction why it failed politically economically and socially
Reconstruction was the attempt to rebuild and reform the South politically, economically, and socially after the Civil War, and to refashion race relations throughout the nation. Historians of the era have focused on four questions: How much change was there between the antebellum and postbellum eras? Was Reconstruction too radical or too conservative? When did it start and end? And how and why did it fail?
Reconstruction was as deeply political as the controversies over slavery and the Civil
War that set the stage for it, and all three followed the same pattern: liberalism triumphed when reactionaries overreached. In 1861, southern secession freed Republicans from the pressure to compromise to preserve the Union. The Lincoln Administration and the Republican majority in
Congress repealed racist laws, declared secessionists= slaves free, enrolled African-American troops, and eventually passed the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery throughout the country. Slaves effectively freed themselves by escaping to Union territory, and they fought valiantly against their former masters. The most deadly war in American history destroyed not only slavery, but most of the South=s physical and financial capital. Defeated, demoralized, and economically depressed, the South in 1865 seemed to lie helpless before the self-confident, prosperous North, whose activist government, bathed in the moral authority of a patriotic, reformist war, appeared poised to remake the country=s nether region.
White southerners, however, acted as though the War had settled nothing except the impracticality of secession and the nominal abolition of slavery. After Lincoln=s assassination and his succession by Tennessee Democrat Andrew Johnson, southern states passed ABlack
Codes@ that denied African-Americans such rights as to buy or lease real estate, to refuse to sign yearly labor contracts, to serve on juries, to testify against whites in court, and to vote. Blacks
Reconstruction was as deeply political as the controversies over slavery and the Civil
War that set the stage for it, and all three followed the same pattern: liberalism triumphed when reactionaries overreached. In 1861, southern secession freed Republicans from the pressure to compromise to preserve the Union. The Lincoln Administration and the Republican majority in
Congress repealed racist laws, declared secessionists= slaves free, enrolled African-American troops, and eventually passed the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery throughout the country. Slaves effectively freed themselves by escaping to Union territory, and they fought valiantly against their former masters. The most deadly war in American history destroyed not only slavery, but most of the South=s physical and financial capital. Defeated, demoralized, and economically depressed, the South in 1865 seemed to lie helpless before the self-confident, prosperous North, whose activist government, bathed in the moral authority of a patriotic, reformist war, appeared poised to remake the country=s nether region.
White southerners, however, acted as though the War had settled nothing except the impracticality of secession and the nominal abolition of slavery. After Lincoln=s assassination and his succession by Tennessee Democrat Andrew Johnson, southern states passed ABlack
Codes@ that denied African-Americans such rights as to buy or lease real estate, to refuse to sign yearly labor contracts, to serve on juries, to testify against whites in court, and to vote. Blacks