What were the goals of Reconstruction? Why weren 't all of these goals achieved? Was Reconstruction a failure? Support your answers with details and examples. Reconstruction - the federal government plan to solve the issues formed from the end of the Civil War – can be divided into 2 parts: physically rebuilding the South and reconstructing the Southern Society. The goal of the reconstruction politically was to integrate Southern states/rebel states back into the U.S., and socially was to integrate the freed slave population to the society. However, ex-confederates of the South resisted this because of the fear of complete turnover of their lives, and to maintain the social hierarchy, where African Americans remained at the bottom by default due to their race. Several organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan were formed to resist reconstruction and preserve white supremacy. Congress responded to the resistance by establishing the Freedmen 's Bureau, whose aimed was to build public schools and universities, provide food and medical care, political equality between blacks and whites and equal access to the judicial system. Lincoln planned to be lenient …show more content…
Despite these efforts, the white Southerners resisted strongly by trying to control the black population in the South. They were able to maintain economic dominance on the freed slaves by the sharecropping system. As times went by, Northerners become exhausted from the Southern resistance and they had their own growing concerns such as economic Panic of 1873; they had increasingly become disinterested in the freed black populations in the South. The South was also able to regain political control back in the region through violence and intimidation. As a result, they were able to regain some political power in the congress. Through a series of events from the 1876 election, Southerners achieved a Compromise of 1877, which made the Republicans to pull federal troops out of the South in return for presidential