Reconstruction Essay

7 May 2014
After the Civil War, the victorious Union enacted a policy of Reconstruction in the former Confederate states. Reconstruction was aimed at creating as smooth a transition as possible for the southern states to re-enter the Union as well as enacting economic and social changes. However, several factors brought about its failure, and as a result the consequences can be seen in the race problems we still have today. In 1862, President Lincoln had appointed temporary military governors to re-establish functional governments in occupied southern states. In order for a state to be allowed to re-enter the Union, it had to meet the criteria, which was established to be that at least 10 percent of the voting population polled in 1860 must denounce the Confederacy and swear allegiance to the Union again. However this was not good enough for Congress, which at the time was dominated by Radical Republicans who fervently called for social and economic change in the south, specifically the rights of blacks. They were especially concerned with guaranteeing black civil and voting rights, and criticized Lincoln for excluding this in the original plan for Reconstruction.
After Lincoln’s death in 1865, Andrew Johnson turned Reconstruction on its head. He made several changes to the Reconstruction policy, nearly cutting Congress off completely from the process. Johnson began putting white supremacists in power of the Reconstruction governments. This began a chain of events that led to the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and the end of the biracial democracy in the south. Johnson put pro-Union Southern political leaders into power, even though many had aided the Confederacy during the war. These men, with Johnson's support, attempted ...

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...d or were members of the organization. By the 1870’s many of the state governments that had been set up by Republicans using the loose coalition of black southerners, carpet baggers, and scalawags had been reverted back and put in the hands of white supremacists and the old elite, seeking revenge. This came in the form of segregation, the denial of land and jobs to blacks, as well as poll taxes and literacy tests to prevent blacks from voting. In the end, Reconstruction held such promise for a truly equal south, but the actions taken by President Johnson and the eventual lack of northern support left the fledgling Reconstruction governments to fend for themselves in a sea of hostile extremists and angered southerners. This failure is the direct cause of the race issues such as segregation and profiling, which still arise even today in the 21st century.