Failure Of Reconstruction Essay

The end of the Civil War in 1865 exited a period of strife and conflict and rapidly ushered in another. At the dawn of the period of Reconstruction, the relatively new nation of America was availed of an opportunity to redefine itself based on the principles of true freedom for all of its citizens. Unfortunately, the ingrained biases, preferences, and selfishness of the human condition consigned the possibility to the gloom of unrecognized potential. Due to legislative outcomes, the attitudes of the public sphere, and the condition of the freed slaves at the end of 1877, Reconstruction should be considered a failure.
Legislative actions were a significant contributor to the failure of Reconstruction. The outlook of the freed slaves at the end

The elite planter class resisted en masse the implementation of freedom through equality, and these groups of laws were the very embodiment of that denial. In essence, the Black Codes re-established slavery through legislated racism that prohibited a variety of rights including voting and also required blacks to engage in annual labor contracts which were, in essence, forced contractual slavery. The North responded quickly with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1866, but even this Act required a congressional override of a presidential veto to become enacted and it still did not protect the right to vote for blacks. The codification of racism into law, through loopholes such as poll taxes, literacy testing, and property ownership requirements, continued throughout the era and extended far into the future of America. (Foner, Eric. Give Me Liberty! An American History, p

On the whole, they had certainly experienced gains over the twelve years since the surrender of the Confederacy. They were certainly allowed to marry, to travel freely, to own their own labor, to own property, and to vote. However, all of these freedoms also came with restrictions that would often nullify their actual practice. The state of free labor is one clear example of this less-than-ideal reality. Because there were strict restrictions on land ownership, most blacks were circumstantially force to return to labor on the very plantations and for the very same owners from which they had been freed just a brief time earlier. Under the guise of free labor, they entered into sharecropping agreements that presented the theoretical possibility of self-sufficiency and financial growth. The reality was often quite different as they signed away many of their rights through these agreements that essentially consigned them once more to a status of slavery controlled by the plantation owner.