Answer:After the American Civil War, the South was in ruins and there was doubt about how the Southern states would treat newly freed slaves. So the US government instituted a 15-year policy known as Reconstruction, in which the military was stationed in the South in order to maintain law and order now that the Confederate government was gone, help rebuild the infrastructure after the devastation of the war, and ensure the equal treatment of whites and blacks, for instance concerning the ability to vote. Reconstruction is widely viewed as a failure; the South suffered from a lot of exploitative Northern entrepreneurs known as "carpetbaggers", and in the end the South reverted to unequal treatment of blacks through Jim Crow laws.
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