Southerners also opposed that the white northerners who had moved to the South and earned positions in the Reconstruction governments sought only to ransack southern treasuries (Carpetbaggers). These charges, however, were generally false. Although economic opportunism and official corruption were certainly facts of life in the South, they were no more prevalent than elsewhere in the nation. Southerners simply were unwilling to accept any form of government in which blacks and northerners played a significant role. They attempted to disturb the Reconstruction governments with outbreaks of violence and through intimidation, composed principally by the secret society known as the Ku Klux Klan. The North eventually grew tired of imposing Reconstruction by force, and by 1877 white southerners had regained control of all their state governments, thus backfiring on the whole goal of the Reconstruction causing inevitable failure. .
Unfortunately, the relatively radical program was not accompanied by anything systematic in the way of social and economic welfare; thus the Negro had the vote before he had either the education or economic power that would enable him to make effective use of it. Much of what was accomplished in the matters of education, for example, had to be undertaken through private efforts by Northern philanthropic groups, and in the face of enormous local resistance. There was even confiscation of the estates, and there was no systematic effort to aid the freedman in acquiring holdings of their own. So based on this, it can be said that the true priorities were reversed: that the Negro was given the vote before he had any real use of it. .
Finally, the federal government was unprepared to take on the massive commitment of long-term supervision, combined with continuing military force, which would have been needed to preserve these rights. In the election of 1876, a Republican, Rutherford B.
