Was Reconstruction A Success Or Failure Essay

Reconstruction was a failure because it caused violence towards white republicans and former slaves. The divide between north and south shifted from the battlefield to politics, and Jim Crow Laws kept African Americans enslaved with the only added bonus being US citizenship and the right for men to vote regardless of race. Reconstruction was meant to help people of all races unite as a country, as well as bring the north and south together after the Civil War. However, the tension between the races only became stronger and brought violence as well as death to former slaves. The KKK killed, harmed, and threatened African Americans all over the United States. “I met four white men about six miles south of town. One of them asked me who I belonged

In the opinion of H.W. Brands, an American historian, the “struggle between north and south shifts from battlefield to political ground” when reconstruction begins (The Failure of Reconstruction, www.history.com). After reconstruction, it became much harder for confederate leaders to be elected or get government jobs, and sharecropping lead many former slaves into a cycle of poverty. Republicans and Democrats were still very much divided, and within twenty years of reconstruction African Americans had been pushed out of congress. “In 1870, only around 30,000 African Americans in the south owned land (usually small plots), compared with four million others who did not. When the war ended three months later, many freed African Americans saw the ‘40 acres and a mule’ policy as proof that they would finally be able to work and own land...Instead, as one of the first acts of reconstruction, President Andrew Jackson ordered all land under federal control to be returned to its previous owners in the summer of 1865” (Sharecropping, www.history.com). After the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, Democrat Andrew Jackson took over as the seventh president of the United States, which changed the course of reconstruction. Jackson changed some of Lincoln’s existing policies like removing government troops from the south. Lincoln put government troops in the south to make sure that southerners went with reconstruction and to people from harming former slaves. Because Andrew Jackson was not as lenient, he allowed the south to pass black codes, or laws that treated black