Was Reconstruction a success?

[??????????]

Two points. Federal property is granted by the states and if the Supreme Court of the time had taken up the souths case the south would have been found in the right.

To respond to your points.

First, I could be wrong but I don't believe there is any legal precedent wherein a state wishes to rescind federal authority over property held by the National government.  A legal challenge (rather than a military challenge) would have been appropriate.

Second, the issue never made it to the Supreme Court because the South didn't bother to do so.  You can't assume an outcome and then just act, you actually have to go through the process.

Agree with you 100% on that but the passions of the time, on BOTH sides, would have never allowed for it.

[WalterMitty]

No... in fact, it was a large reason for the resentment felt by Southerns towards blacks.

correct answer.

[5fins]

Clearly the answer is no.  The Radical Republicans, in their haste to punish the South, set black people back 100 years.  Were they any better in January of 1963 than in January of 1863?  Instead of helping black people, the Radical Republicans just made things harder for them.

Reconstruction was not a success not because of the radical Republicans but because of embittered whites in the south and ambivalence in the north to the plight of the Freedmen in the south. In the end by 1877 the Redeemer movement which was made up of x-confederates control the state governments of the old confederacy and the Freedman were regulated to second class citizens. One could say the civil war was a draw for the union was preserved and slavery ended and white rule in the south with the freedman under their thumb.

The radical republicans vision did not come to pass until 1960's when the courts reinterpreted the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments of the Constitution from earlier court decisions and a change the the public opinion.

[pbrower2a]

Genuine success in Reconstruction would have established a South more like the North in its economic realities. The northern cash economy (implying small farms, manufacturing, and commerce) allowed more means of making money for entrepreneurs and workers. The feudal agrarian elite of the old South didn't want any competition from commerce or industry and weren't going to see the giant plantations subdivided. The common man was to be a sharecropper, a serf, or a laborer with no control over the terms of existence.  Reconstruction showed for a short time what was possible as once-powerless and even enslaved people people discovered what they could do in a capitalist society that they could not do in a feudal society. Then they found themselves powerless against the collective will of giant landowners who controlled not only the means of production (and squeezed out all competition) but also the means of personal survival. The state legislatures quickly became stooges of the agrarian elite and found clever ways to re-institute the powerless of the majorities of white and black people alike -- except that they offered a racial divide as an anodyne to poor whites, whose best opportunities would be as enforcers of the will of the agrarian elites.

A real success of Reconstruction would have established an alternative to the plantation as a social structure and as a means of creating wealth. The agrarian elite achieved anew its own dominance, and although it no longer had slavery it found other means of ensuring its dominion upon all people other than itself. "Forty acres and a mule" as a means of ensuring some modicum of economic survival independent of the agrarian elite would have solved many problems in itself. It would have also fragmented a once-solid political order that did only harm to those who didn't own the plantations (and the state legislatures).

Reconstruction failed because it lacked a sound economic basis -- the fragmentation of economic power.

[Rob]

It's amazing that so many people cling to discredited myths about Reconstruction. Folks, this anti-Radical "history" is nothing but conservative revisionism that was most popular from around 1890 through the 1970s. Just to name one example, the notion that southern states governed by interracial Republicans were unusually corrupt is false. Less accountability and, ultimately, more corruption went along with the reestablishment of racist rule.

Conservatives need to start reading some decent history, at least on this subject. Try Eric Foner...