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Reconstruction Era
Almost all aspects of Reconstruction were a failure. The only thing it really accomplished was to get the Union back together after the Civil War. Let us look at the two main ways in which...
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American Civil War
For most southerners, the Civil War was an existential struggle for the preservation of the only lives they knew, which unfortunately were intimately tied to the welfare and fate of thousands of...
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Reconstruction Era
The freed slaves’ lives changed dramatically during the Reconstruction period. However, it is not clear how much of the change was actually brought about by Reconstruction and how much was...
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History
President Andrew Johnson’s plan for Reconstruction was much more lenient than the plan that Congress eventually passed that is known as “Radical Reconstruction.” Johnson, like President...
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History
In general, Reconstruction was a failure. However, there are at least two major ways in which it can be called a success. For the most part, Reconstruction failed badly. If the point of...
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History
During the Reconstruction Era, violence served the political purpose of making it easier for white Southerners to resist the Reconstruction governments and to “redeem” their states. During...
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History
There are two main reasons why it was very difficult (and maybe even impossible) to use military force to bring about social and cultural change in the Reconstruction era. First, it was difficult...
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History
The basic political situation that brought Reconstruction to an end was that the Republicans and the Democrats came to a stalemate in the election of 1876. This led to a deal being made in which...
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History
There is some debate among historians on this topic. They do not necessarily agree on the overall meaning and impact of Reconstruction on African Americans. It is clear that Reconstruction did not...
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History
During the Reconstruction era, African Americans in the South experienced many different changes. In some ways, things got better. Sometimes, however, they got better and then they got worse...
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History
The impact that the Reconstruction Era had on the lives of the newly freed African Americans is very mixed. While it was a time of improvement for African Americans in many ways, it was also a...
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History
There are surely ways in which the country failed in that era, but there are also ways in which it was very successful. There are, it seems to me, no eras in which our country has succeeded in...
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Reconstruction Era
In order to answer this question, you will first need to determine what the goal of Reconstruction was. A thing is usually a success if it achieves its goals. Therefore, in order to determine if...
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History
With respect to African American history, the Reconstruction amendments represent a great accomplishment and a great promise, but one that was not kept for decades. There were three Reconstruction...
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History
With respect to African American history, the Compromise of 1877 represents how, once again, the rights and interests of African Americans have been ignored by whites when that has been convenient....
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Reconstruction Era
Although this is one of the most asked and pondered questions about the post-Civil War era, it is inherently unanswerable. We simply do not know enough to say. It is true that Lincoln proposed a...
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History
This is in many ways a matter of opinion or interpretation. There have been at least three major interpretations of Reconstruction by historians. The first interpretation held the Reconstruction...
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Reconstruction Era
While they are not as widely studied as institutions like the black church, African American lodges and other fraternal organizations did play an important role in providing mutual aid to African...
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Reconstruction Era
There were two major types of issues and attitudes that led to the end of Reconstruction in 1877. First, there were political issues. By 1877, the United States in general, and the North in...
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Reconstruction Era
Land and the control of labor became major points of contention because these were closely connected to economic viability and to freedom. The ability to make a living and the ability to feel that...
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Reconstruction Era
There are at least two likely reasons for this. First, the freed slaves would not necessarily have trusted the federal government. There would have been little reason for them to assume that the...
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History
The Freedmen’s Bureau was formed in 1865 towards the end of the civil was as a social and humanitarian assistance organization for freed slaves. It was run by the federal government under the...
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Reconstruction Era
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Reconstruction Era
The Freedmen’s Bureau was a governmental agency that was supposed to do everything necessary to help the freed slaves make the transition to freedom. This was, of course, a massive undertaking....
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Reconstruction Era
In answering this, we must first realize that not every freed slave would have had the same vision of freedom. Therefore, we can only generalize. The general consensus is that freed slaves wanted...
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Reconstruction Era
For the purposes of this answer, I will assume that you are asking about the formal enfranchisement of African Americans after the Civil War, not about the efforts in the 1960s to ensure that black...
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Reconstruction Era
While people typically see the Civil War as a war about slavery, it can also be seen as a war about the South’s right or ability to govern itself as it saw fit. When we look at the Civil War in...
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Reconstruction Era
Reconstruction failed to bring equality to the freed slaves because it would have been very hard to bring them equality even if the government had had more power and will than it actually did....
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Reconstruction Era
In the time right after the Civil War, the South tried to reinstate the social (and racial) hierarchy largely through the creation of the “black codes.” After this was done away with by the...
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Reconstruction Era
Depending on how you define “major components,” you could say that there were three major components to Reconstruction. First, there was the component of military government. At the beginning...
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Reconstruction Era
As with your previous question, this one appears to be taken from For the Record, edited by Shi and Mayer. My answer comes from the excerpt of Howell Cobb’s letter that is printed in that...
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Reconstruction Era
From other questions that you have asked on eNotes, I believe that you are asking questions based on the primary sources in For the Record, edited by Shi and Mayer. I am basing my answer on the...
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Reconstruction Era
As with your previous question, this one appears to be taken from For the Record, edited by Shi and Mayer. My answer comes from the excerpt of the New York Times article that is listed as “From...
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Reconstruction Era
In the earliest parts of the Reconstruction Era, the Republicans found the black codes to be very objectionable because they seemed to indicate that the South had not learned its lesson from the...
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Reconstruction Era
Both of these two terms refer to white people who were connected to the Reconstruction governments in the South after the Civil War. The difference between the two is that the “carpetbaggers”...
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Reconstruction Era
The North was concerned with the South’s struggling economy because the North and South were back to being part of the same country. Since they were part of the same country, they were also part...
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Reconstruction Era
There were essentially two major phases of Reconstruction. The first is often called Presidential Reconstruction, and lasted until the midterm elections of 1866. The second, which lasted from 1867...