The Successes of Reconstruction
Reconstruction was a success in the sense that America,
after 1877, could
once again be called the United States. All of the southern states
had drafted new constitutions; ratified the Thirteenth, Fourteenth,
and Fifteenth Amendments; and pledged loyalty to the Union. Together,
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.
As one historian noted, the United States before the Civil War were a
country, but the United States after the war was a
nation.
The Failures of Reconstruction
However, although Reconstruction was a success in a broad
sense, it was a failure in several specific ways. The swift changes
in political power in the South rendered useless most of the legislation
that Radical Republicans had passed through Congress. Rutherford
B. Hayes’s removal of federal troops from the South in 1877 allowed many
former Confederates and slave owners to regain power, and this return
of power to whites also meant a return to the policy of the old
South. Southern politicians passed the black codes and voter qualifications
and allowed the sharecropping system to thrive—all with the support
of a conservative U.S. Supreme Court, whose key court rulings in
the 1870s
and 1880s
effectively repealed the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and
the Civil Rights Act of 1875.
As a result, by 1877,
northerners were tired of Reconstruction; weary of battling southern
elites, scandal, and radicalism; and had largely lost interest in
supporting black civil rights. Theoretically, North and South reached
a compromise: black civil liberties and racial equality would be
set aside in order to put the Union back together. As it turned
out, blacks would not regain the support of the federal government
until the civil rights movement of the 1960s.
