Question

Did Reconstruction change the South? If so, how? If not, why not? What brought Reconstruction to an end?

Answer 1

Reconstruction, in the history of the United States, the era following the American Civil War and during which efforts were made to address the inequities of slavery and its political, social and economic legacy and to resolve the problems resulting from the readmission to the Union of the eleven states that had settled at or before the outbreak of war. Originally depicted by many historians as a time when vindictive Radical Republicans fastened black supremacy upon the vanquished Confederacy, Reconstruction has been regarded more sympathetically since the late 20th century as a praiseworthy experiment in interracial democracy.

Reconstruction saw far-reaching shifts in political life in America. New laws and constitutional amendments at the national level permanently altered the federal system and the concept of American citizenship. A politically empowered black community in the South joined white allies in bringing the Republican Party to power, and with it a redefinition of government roles.

The 1867 Reconstruction Acts divided the south into five military districts and defined how new governments were to be formed, based on manhood suffrage without regard to race. Thus began the period of Radical or Congressional Reconstruction, which lasted until the end of the last government of the Southern Republic in 1877; The second large party, scalawags, or native-born white republicans, included some merchants and planters, but most were Southern up-country nonslaveholding small farmers. During the Civil War, loyal to the Union, they saw the Republican Party as a means to prevent Confederates from regaining power in the South.

Reconstruction meanwhile soon began to wane. During the 1870s, many Republicans withdrew from both the Civil War-spawned racial egalitarianism as well as the expansive concept of federal power. Southern corruption and instability, critics of Reconstruction argued, stemmed from the exclusion from power of the "best men" of the region–the planters. When Northern Republicans became more mainstream, Reconstruction symbolized a misguided attempt to uplift society's lower classes. A series of Supreme Court decisions, beginning with the Slaughterhouse Cases in 1873, severely restricted the breadth of restoration laws and constitutional amendments, reflecting the changing climate.

Nevertheless, while the amendments to the Reconstruction were flagrantly violated, they persisted in the Constitution, sleeping giants, to be awoken by subsequent generations trying to restore the promise of true independence for the descendants of slavery. It was not until the 1960s that the nation would again seek to fulfill the Reconstruction's political and social goals in the civil rights movement, often called the "second reconstruction."