Pros And Cons Of The Reconstruction Era

There were many outcomes from the Reconstruction era. Some were successful, but most were not. The few successes were mostly beneficial to the Union; however, they did not resolve the problems that Reconstruction was supposed to. The purpose of Reconstruction was to end slavery, giving African American males the same rights as white males. This did not happen as there was the poor treatment and discrimination of African Americans after the war. African Americans were forced to work when they did not want to by using black codes as a legal form of slavery, denying them their 15th amendment right to vote, and the Ku Klux Klan taking away their rights and make the world an unsafe place for them. The reason that the civil war started was the

The 15th amendment should have prevented these laws from being passed, but it did not. Voter qualifications required that in order to vote one must be able to read or understand a part of the Constitution. This prevented African Americans from voting because when they were enslaved they were not allowed to be educated which prevented them from learning how to read or comprehend writing. Another qualification was with property. The land requirement made it so anyone who did not own land worth at least $300 could not vote. In Mississippi there was a $2 poll tax preventing unpaid African Americans form voting. These laws did not affect poor white Americans because of the “Grandfather Clause.” The “Grandfather Clause” stated that if a father or grandfather could vote so could their son/grandson. This clause made it so the only citizens affected by the voter qualifications were freed

The KKK was a group of white southerners who did not want the policies establishing political and economic equality for blacks to be successful. The KKK engaged in underground campaigns of intimidation and violence directed at Republican leaders, both white and black. One of the most notorious areas of the Klan was South Carolina. In January 1871, five hundred masked men attacked a Union county jail and lynched eight black prisoners. Acts like these would go “unnoticed” by officials and other influential citizens in the area because of the fear of how the Klan would retaliate and also by the lack of care for what the Klan was doing. Even if officials were to charge Klan members with a crime it would have been hard to prove due to lack of witnesses willing to testify. Agents of the Freedmen’s Bureau reported weekly assaults and murders of blacks. The Klan violence was very successful in suppressing black voting. The prevention of black voters in itself was a blatant refusal to accept the 15th amendment. The Klan by itself prevented blacks from receiving the rights they were supposed to receive as a result of