Failure Of Reconstruction

1. Many historians consider reconstruction to be a failure. Post Civil War, the Union had won and set to appease the southern ex-Confederacy through reconstruction. Abraham Lincoln had issued the Emancipation Proclamation and the amendments freeing the southern slaves and granting them citizenship. But after his assassination, Reconstruction plummeted. President Johnson replaced Lincoln and was a racist. He pardoned southern plantation aristocrats who struggled and enacted the Black Codes to restrict the freed slaves from social integration. Freedmen began to practice the sharecropping system, which led to much depression and debt for southern tenant farmers, most poor whites, and blacks. This also led to the emergence of Jim Crow segregation

Meanwhile, the struggle between Johnson and Congress came about, which led to his impeachment in 1868. Reconstruction failed to improve the South economically because European nations no longer depended on the South for cotton since they had important colonies in Egypt, which produced cheaper cotton. Additionally, reconstruction also failed due to "carpetbaggers" from the North because they took advantage of the devastated South both politically and financially. Since participation to hold public office was not permitted to any Southerners, the Northerners placed men in office that could be manipulated by them. Reconstruction can be considered a large failure because of resentment in the South and it seems as if they felt like they were being punished for losing the war.

2. Growing businesses prospered in the 19th century due to improvements in technology and the surplus of work labor. The methods used to run these corporations were by the use of monopolies, which were divided into the robber barons and the captains of industry. The robber barons were negatively portrayed monopolists who were discerned to be hoarding their wealth. Some famous robber barons were

6. The Homestead Act was passed by Abraham Lincoln in 1862. It offered 160 acres of land to settle in the West to settlers; however, there was limited success due to the limited supply of arable land used for farming. Since most of the land was infertile, rocky, dry, and not agriculturally suited, many people competed for land that was near a water source to make farming possible. Many people did take the acres of land in response to land speculation and corruption but instead of living on it, they sold it for a higher cost to gain profit. Meanwhile, the government sold the land to private businesses like railroads when not many people utilized the Homestead