Unit 3 Paper: Successes and Failures of Reconstruction
There was no infrastructure left in the south after the civil war, Sherman had burned everything from the Georgia coast to the Mississippi committing war crimes as he went. He even managed to burn Atlanta to nothing. Almost all of the war was fought in the south, because of that; there was an unbelievable amount of damage to buildings, bridges, farms, and everything else in the areas of the battle fields. The South at the time didn't have enough resources to do the repairs, because of that; they needed help from the North.
With having to rebuild the infrastructure, there needed to be a structured way to re-integrate the former Confederate states back into the Union. Have the appropriate justice carried out on the former leaders of the Confederacy, and so on. Reconstruction kept the process somewhat organized, during the start, unfortunately it didn’t last, but it was better than having mass chaos from start to finish.
Reconstruction was a success in a few senses, one was, that America, after 1877, could be called the United States again. All of the southern states had drafted new constitutions; ratified the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments; and pledged loyalty to the Union. The Civil War and Reconstruction also settled the states’ fights vs. federalism debate that had been going on since the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of the 1790s and the Nullification Crisis of the 1830s.
Reconstruction also had its failures as well. One of the biggest failures was the Ku Klux Klan. Ku Klux Klan was a group of people who wore robes and masks and pretended to be the ghosts of the Confederate soldiers. They were scared of changes, and the rising rights of the African Americans, who they wanted to be laborers and slaves. So, they attacked them, usually by putting their homes on fire. There were many kinds of racist attitudes towards African Americans, and not only in the South, but in the North as...