FAILURE OF RECONSTRUCTION
The tumultuous period of American history which we now refer to Reconstruction began in 1863 when Abraham Lincoln first outlined his Reconstruction program, but its inevitable end and relative lack of success had been predetermined more than two centuries before, with the arrival of the first Europeans and their slaves in North America. To claim that Reconstruction failed solely as a result of one specific reason or another would be crude and unobservant, but the specter of racism clearly lay at the heart of all reasons imaginable.1 The horrible racism that eventually brought Reconstruction to its knees persisted during the 1860s and 1870s in a number of different forms. Two main racist influences combined in the late nineteenth century to destroy Reconstruction. The most important of these influences was the popular racism which had inherently existed in both northern and southern colonial America since the establishment of the institution of slavery in the seventeenth century. The second important influence was the standards of racism supported by the first Reconstruction president, Andrew Johnson.Although the institution of slavery existed predominantly in the South before the Civil War, the morals and ethics perpetuated by
All of the evidence is compelling: racism was the main cause of the failure of Reconstruction. Neither the Constitution nor governmental structure played a larger role in the institution's downfall than the simple yet appallingly horrible hatred that so many white Americans felt against their Black brethren. Had racism not been the prevalent force in suppressing Black political involvement in the South during Reconstruction, there is a strong chance that the institution would have bloomed rather than withered. While there is much persuasive evidence in support of arguments made by Dunning historians and others with the same viewpoint, racism still remains the primary cause of Reconstruction's failure. Inherent racism in the South was much more of a driving factor in the institution's downfall than was northern involvement in southern post-Civil War government. Franklin contends that, while southerners disliked and resented the northern white carpetbaggers who were in control of the Radical Reconstruction, they hated and despised newly enfranchised Blacks.14 Whites felt threatened by Reconstruction because it attempted to equalize them with Blacks. It was the racism of men, and not the governmental system, which brought down Reconstruction.
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Approximate Word count = 1549
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page double spaced)
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