114k views
2 votes
Explain why Reconstruction ultimately failed.​

User Discodane
by
3.6k points

2 Answers

4 votes
Merely to call Reconstruction a failure is too simplistic. Reconstruction was overthrown, subverted, and betrayed — and then replicated, since many of the same hesitations over costs, internecine politics, and xenophobia led to dreary repetitions of these mistakes after the First World War and after the two Gulf Wars.
User Steffo Dimfelt
by
3.3k points
1 vote

first it didnt fail it was overthrown. The end of Reconstruction is often spoken of in psychological terms, as a collapse of white Americans' nerve, or as a failure of Republican political will, when in cold truth Reconstruction did not fail so much as it was overthrown.

User Daniel Viglione
by
3.5k points