What Are The Three Major Goals Of The Reconstruction Era?

The twelve-year era after the Civil War was called the Reconstruction Period. Reconstruction was a federal policy established immediately after the South surrendered; it was an attempt to create a new Southern society and heal the terrible wounds between the North and South. The three main goals of the Reconstruction were to "protect the rights of the freed slaves, rebuild the South 's devastated economy, and enforce the loyalty of the ex-confederates . In spite of tremendous efforts, the Reconstruction Period failed to completely accomplish any of the three goals, but it was especially lacking in its attempts to make Blacks and whites equal and was a time of intense discrimination toward Blacks.
In 1865, at the end of the Civil War, the South was destroyed. Plantations were demolished, the economy was ruined, the labor system was shattered, and several million slaves were now free laborers. South Carolina looked like a "broad black streak of ruin and desolation" (Unger 414). In the Shenandoah Valley hardly any farm animals were left alive. Many cities had almost nothing left of their business districts (Unger 414). People in both the North and South were angry. The North was
Poor white farmers especially resented Blacks and felt any advancement for Blacks weakened their own difficult economic and social circumstances (Garraty 282). The violence towards Blacks that had been sporadic now began to be organized. The Ku Klux Klan (KKK) was one such organization. The Ku Klux Klan began in Pulaski, Tennessee in 1866. Six veterans of the Confederate Army claimed they were "bored" so they formed a club, calling it the KKK. These men also maintained that it was an organization to protect the entire South from "niggers and nigger lovers" (Mckissack 325). But it soon came to be headed by men who had the goal of wanting to drive Blacks out of politics and