Failure Of Reconstruction

The North ended the Reconstruction because they were too busy to look after the South, they were racist to African Americans, and they removed soldiers from Southern states. America was well into the Reconstruction and the nation was happy. The election of 1876 ruined the dreams of over 3 million African Americans. The winner of the election of 1876 was Rutherford B. Hayes. President Hayes was a member of the Democratic party, but actually did not win the election until later.

The Reconstruction failed badly for many different reasons. Racism is one of the major key roles that caused the reconstruction to fail. No one could seem to see that blacks where equal since they believed that the blacks where less than them. Slavery also played a key role into the failure of reconstruction. Before the war slaves where considered three fifths of one.

With the rise of monopolies, small companies and farmers suffered immensely likewise wages were cutback which led to many strikes and boycotts throughout the nation. However, Monopolies also lowered prices for various goods. Wealth increased due to the rich investing it and expanding new markets, which opened new job opportunities for non-skilled and skilled workers alike. Many companies also made it their duty to improve the community by funding myriad

Reconstruction caused prejudice and inequality. To elaborate, the creation of the Ku Klux Klan and the Black Codes were both in the time period of reconstruction, which caused chaos and violence throughout the Union. One of the goals of reconstruction was to repair the economy in the South, because it depended on slavery, which was now illegal, due to the thirteenth amendment. The South’s economic system now depended on Sharecropping, which caused former slaves to be in constant debt and was unjust to the black society. The reconstruction time period, was a time of dispute between the Union.

Another hit economically was that the price of cotton had dropped, which mean the crops that were salvageable had much less value than before putting the southern famers economic state even further damaged. The Farmers and some of their workers grew to strongly dislike and distrust the owners and corporations they did business with. The Populist Party had strong ambitions to overcome just gold coinage, but include with that the use of silver. The farmers found it unfair that there was no chance for them to improve their standings, with just the Democratic and Republican parties. In the late 1880’s, the Southern Farmers Alliance held a conference with the National Agricultural Wheel to unite the two groups into one.

Corporate greedy and corrupt politicians were specific problems and injustices that were present in American life during the late 1800s and early 1900s however these were addressed during the progressive era with laws and regulations. Throughout the gilded era corrupt politicians and corporate greedy allowed the upper class and businessmen to take advantage of the working class. This means that a majority of the population were hurt during the gilded age whereas a small percentage benefitted. As seen in document 1, living conditions were crowded, dirty, and unsafe. This was caused by the lack of regulations and laws which allowed businessmen to get away with paying their employees unethically low wages without benefits.

Twain uses the King’s greed to represent the southerners who did not want to give up slavery because they would lose money from it. In the end, slaves were freed and hundreds of plantations and southern properties were destroyed during the Civil War. One critic even wrote, “ Huck has to keep moving,

One of the biggest thing that Jackson had done as a president was in 1832. Jackson vetoed a bill that would renew the second bank charter early. Jackson stated “I will kill it!”. He said this because he didn’t like the bank at all and he believed that it made the rich richer and the poor poorer. He said in his veto message “It is easy to conceive that great evils to our country and its institutions might flow from such a concentration of power in the hands of a few men irresponsible to the people.” He is saying that the bank is being taken over by the rich and that the bank isn’t helping the common men at all.

In multiple letters and notes he wrote he expressed his guilt for the slaves and once the slaves paid off their debt and Jefferson’s he hoped to free them. Jefferson and his slaves remained in debt until the day he died. Jefferson believed that slavery not only deprived blacks of their liberty but had an “unhappy” influence on the masters and their children (Takaki 63). If a master is constantly punishing a slave and cannot restrain, the child’s master will imitate and master it, resulting in a nonstop cycle of slavery. Jefferson wanted to abolish slavery but when freed they had to be removed from society since slaves took up most of Virginia’s population.

My argumentation will consequently fall in two parts: on the one hand I will demonstrate that the Reconstruction Era marks the end of a time and then I will show that the reconstruction is far from fulfilling its ambitions. The Reconstruction Era brought many revolutions in the South, the American legislation and former slaves ' rights, making it a real rupture in American history. The Reconstruction had also to be literal and start with the South, whose lands are devastated, and with its resulting fallen economy. After the war, the Confederacy was ravaged, its cities looted, its railroads gone and its farm fields destroyed.

Although, the North is often portrayed as the “good guys” when it comes to the fall of Reconstruction but in actuality they were equally as guilty as the south was. According to Document C In the 1870s, the people of the north were beginning to grow indifferent to the events happening in the south because their focus shifted to the scandals going on around them, such as the Panic of 1873.The government at this time in the North was ran by “carpetbaggers” or a political candidate who sought election in an area they had no local connections to. The North began to grow tired of this type of government and they also began to become tired of fighting against discrimination in the south because of this. Increased anger about government corruption lead to less interest in Reconstruction. Racism still existed in the North and contributed to the fall as well, for example many people believed that people of color were unfit to be government officials.