History of the United States II / Unit 1 USH2 0034 review, 2 to 3 minutes
Whether Reconstruction Failed
The idea
Whether Reconstruction failed is a question the course's two witnesses answer with both halves at once. The Yawp says Reconstruction achieved Lincoln's paramount desire, the restoration of the Union, and ended legal slavery forever, but that African Americans remained second-class citizens and most of Reconstruction's promises went unmet. Digital History says real gains had been won even though full equality remained an unfulfilled promise. It lists them: chattel slavery defeated, the gang system of labour ended, the South's first statewide public school systems, the first Black colleges, independent Black churches, and about twenty percent of Black southerners owning land by eighteen eighty. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, it says, established the possibilities for later attacks on discrimination. The same page speaks of Reconstruction's failure and its long costs: racism more deeply embedded, a southern economy dependent on cotton, more southerners reduced to tenant farming, and one party holding political power alone.
In practice
One ledger with two columns: three amendments, elected Black senators and new public schools on one side; the Redeemers, the Klan and the withdrawn troops on the other.
Where people slip
Two misreadings sit on either side of this question. The first treats the Reconstruction governments as corrupt failures and Redemption as a return to order. The anchor lists what those governments built, and both witnesses describe Redemption as an overthrow by fraud and terror; the Yawp calls the era one of revolutionary possibility and violent backlash. The second misreading treats failure as the whole story and forgets that the amendments stayed in the Constitution, where later movements found them. The word failure fits what happened to the promise of equality. It does not fit the amendments, which outlasted the governments that ratified them. Hold both halves, as the witnesses do.
Your place on the trail
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Builds on
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