Was Reconstruction a Failure or Success - Essay Example

Slavery may have temporarily ended but the much anticipated improvement of the lives of Negroes did not happen.  For example, the change that happened in most black nuclear families was mainly to seek their independence from white authority.  Slave quarters may have vanished but tenant farms replaced them which have very little improvement from its previous state.  Perhaps what made the failure “splendid” was because the period gave Black Americans an idea of what their future might be as free men and the possibility of reaping their own labors as free citizens and not as bondage towards plantations.

  Despite little improvement in their economic conditions, the African Americans were given the right to vote by the Freeman’s Bureau.  Many of the Black American’s were also educated that gave them an idea of what a real freedom would be.  One converging account why the Reconstruction failed was also attributed to the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln whose great project – the Reconstruction remain unfinished.  The way his successor President Andrew Jackson handled the Reconstruction only highlighted that it was only Lincoln who was capable of handling the transition of Blacks into modern American society.

  President Jackson was not able to compromise with the Republicans but instead created a political gridlock that disabled his ability to continue Lincoln’s Reconstructionist policy in the South. . President Jackson was not able to compromise with the Republicans but instead created a political gridlock that disabled his ability to continue Lincoln’s Reconstructionist policy in the South. The Republicans left on their own was also equally inadequate as it negated President Andrew’s intention to continue the Reconstruction policy of Lincoln and instead instituted its own brand of hatred politics towards the defeated Confederacy by instituting black supremacist government.

Corruption and ineptness followed whereby the Freedmen did not know how to exercise responsibly the newly found political power entrusted upon them and instead squandered them away. Instead of ending segregation between races, the black Southerners contributed to the failure of Reconstruction by imposing their own brand of discriminatory policies whereby the whites retaliated and overthrow the “dominance” of the black government and restored the home rule or white supremacy (Fitzgerald, 2008).

And so the old status quo was restored and this time, with more hatred among the Southerners (the white community) that it made them unalterably opposed to any idea of ending segregation, readmission or reintegration of blacks into American society. This served as the final nail on the coffin of Reconstruction which was doomed to fail with the death of Abraham Lincoln. There are several evidences why the Reconstruction failed. First, the Southerners reasserted “home rule” or reinstitution of white supremacist policy in the South and the emergence of Klu Klux Klan who were clod in white garments in imitation of the African American’s ghostly superstition. This