The nation achieved some of the goals. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments passed, thus ending slavery and giving African Americans both citizenship and suffrage. As for Lincoln's goal of peace, there were no major Confederate trials for treason, and most of the former Confederate soldiers were pardoned. The nation was reunited with the end of military Reconstruction in 1877 though the South would continue to lag behind the rest of the nation economically.

Douglass believed in equality for African Americans. Terrorist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan sprang up in the South in order to maintain the racial status quo. Though Grant pursued the Klan, many localities still banned travel by blacks and arrested them in disproportionate numbers in order to work in chain gangs.

The Freedmen's Bureau, an organization designed to help poor blacks as well as white refugees of the war, was never fully funded by the Reconstruction presidents. The former planters still managed to hold power through sharecroppers where they used a surplus of unskilled labor and kept them tied to the land by debt. Segregation would ultimately be the law of the land with the Supreme Court's Plessy v. Ferguson ruling. This case only legalized what had been going on in the South for years—the creation of separate facilities for whites and blacks.

In a sense, Lincoln's plan was realized with the ending of slavery and no further civil wars. One does not know if Lincoln's view on races would have evolved or if he would have had disagreements with a Radical Republican Congress, as he was tragically assassinated days after Lee's surrender. Douglass's view of greater equality and opportunities would not be realized during the Reconstruction era. The use of segregation, poll taxes, and other laws at the local and state levels maintained the racial status quo in the South for years after Reconstruction.

What goals did Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass hope to achieve through their Reconstruction plan? Did the nation achieve those goals?

Both Douglass and Lincoln wanted to end slavery with the end of the war. Lincoln's view on this subject changed during the war as he used the Emancipation Proclamation as a war measure. Douglass, on the other hand, saw the end of slavery as a humanitarian objective for the Union army. Douglass was also one of the loudest promoters of using African Americans in the Union Army. Douglass hoped that once white America saw the courage of black soldiers then they would be more accepting of whites and blacks as equal in society.

Lincoln's view toward equality was different than Douglass's. Lincoln initially hoped to have a colony for the freed slaves in the Western Hemisphere, but this plan died as the first colonists were decimated by the poor water quality in the colony. Lincoln did not see equality for former slaves as something that could be achieved while Douglass saw it as the primary goal of the war. One does not know if Lincoln's attitude toward the former slaves would have changed since he was assassinated within days of Lee's surrender at Appomattox.

The army provided employment for African Americans after the Civil War as many went west to fight in the wars against the Plains Indians. Equality would still be an unattainable goal in much of the country. African Americans faced racism in the South from the whites who thought they were superior to them before the war. In the North many were indifferent to African Americans or even hostile since this was yet another group who would be competition for jobs. Even after African Americans achieved citizenship and suffrage it was often up to local officials to determine to what extent they could exercise these rights. While the slaves were freed as of 1865, Douglass's ultimate goal of changing the hearts and minds of white America still had not come to pass.