Question

1.In what ways did Reconstruction have revolutionary potential? How did the United States create and enforce policies supportive of Reconstruction? Why did Reconstruction ultimately fail?   Essay question

Answer 1

• Reconstruction did bring revolutionary changes in politics because of the ratification of the 15th Amendment which granted African Americans the right to vote.
• The reconstruction era actually was revolutionary for important reasons. It was during Reconstruction that the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution was passed. This Amendment is considered the most important addition to the Constitution since its inception, as it made all people born or naturalized in any state citizens.
• This effectively overruled the Dred Scott decision by which Scott had been denied relief as he was not a citizen.
  
• 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with decisions in the Slaughterhouse Cases, the Civil Rights Cases, and United States v. Cruikshank that effectively repealed the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and the Civil Rights Act of 1875.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 owned by rich white farmers became widespread in the South.
• With little economic power, blacks ended up having to fight for civil rights on their own, as northern whites lost interest in Reconstruction by the mid-1870s.
• By 1877, northerners were tired of Reconstruction, scandals, radicals, and the fight for blacks’ rights. Reconstruction thus came to a close with many of its goals left unaccomplished.
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