Civil War Reconstruction Essay

606 Words3 Pages

The Civil War allowed the United States to make the changes necessary to unify the country. In addition, it began one of the most transitional periods in the United States’ history. This period, the Reconstruction, brought about many political, social, and economic changes, which were both beneficial and disagreeable. The 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, the Panic of 1873, and the formation of the Ku Klux Klan are just a few examples of heavily impacting events for the United States. During the Reconstruction period there were numerous political transformations in the country. The most notable being the addition of three Amendments, the 13th, the 14th, and the 15th. These Amendments outlawed slavery, granted citizenship to all former slaves …show more content…

Especially in the south, were many plantation owners lost their workforce. They would now either be forced to pay their laborers or sell their farms, neither of which they were partial to. Out of this came sharecropping, where landowners gave laborers a house, and land, in exchange for a share of their crops. However this system had many issues, the laborers were almost always African Americans with no savings to buy tools, which they would need to buy from the landowners, putting them in debt, and making it difficult for them to become independent. Another result of the end of the war was the Depression of 1873, which raised the unemployment rate to 15% and created greater tensions among the working class in the United States. The economically flourishing South transformed into an economically struggling area, while the North suffered as a result of the collapse of the banks. The Civil War and Reconstruction brought about many economic struggles to the United States and transformed the status of the South. The Civil War indisputably transformed the United States politically, socially, and economically. The 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments sparked most of these changes in addition to the reunification of the Confederate states. These transformations set the course for the rest of the 19th