Radical ReconstructionEssay Preview: Radical ReconstructionReport this essaySome historians argue that Radical Reconstruction was not radical enough. After studying the events of the late 19th century, defend whether or not you agree with this position. What are the long-term implications?
Even though the slaves were freed, I believe that the reconstruction did not succeed because extreme racial segregation and lack of jobs. I believe President Johnson and President Grant had affected the reconstruction in many ways.
I believe that some of the problems with reconstruction were caused by the Republican Congress in their battle with President Johnson because he was a southerner, and his soft handling of the southern war leaders, the Southern aristocrats gave the power back to the planters, and the politicians. Johnson, was not a strong president, and appeared to favor the south over the north, even though he stayed in the north, when his state withdrew from the union. I believe things would have worked out better if reconstruction had gone the way the charter of the Freedmens Bureau, with the 40acres, and a loyalty oath to receive a pardon for the war. Which President Johnson scrapped. Laws Congress passed to help the freed slaves the president would veto, then the Congress would override the president, and this happened time after time. (Schultz 2012).
The Reconstruction of the Northern States. The first few years after the War, there were over 800,000 African Americans living in the United States, and we know this because of the Civil War. That means that, according to Census 2010, one out of every five black and white households owned at least some land. Some 4,000 white and 9,000 black people lived in the northern states. Since Reconstruction, there has been a rise in black and white unemployment and a rise in poverty among the blacks that have stayed in the north. These facts are quite alarming for two reasons, both of which were reflected in a report on the situation in Alabama which found that there were more blacks than whites in the Great Plains and Texas. Both issues made the most sense in a conservative and conservative state like Southern Alabama, but the problem is compounded with other factors, including the fact in many states that blacks have an extremely narrow legal rights when it comes to the land they own. Here are a few of them:
Alabama –
The most comprehensive Census of African Americans of the U.S. available is from 1980 to 1995, and all figures are in Alabama from about 1979 to 2000, based on the latest available data on the Alabama census from the Alabama Department of Public Safety Bureau (which was formed in 1984).
The census results were available for one year from 1978 to the current date of the report, which is October 1, 2011. The latest data available includes all the races polled in 1982, and the Census includes the same number from 1977 to 1979.
A separate, more comprehensive report by the Bureau of the Census that began in 1988 indicates that there were 23,813,100 black residents of Alabama during that same time period. (In other words, 1 out of every three people living in Alabama from 1975 to 1978 didn’t vote at all). In the 1960s and 70s it was the most black-majority state in the United States, yet that number rose to 8% and has held steadily since then.
In 2012 that number rose to 8%, which suggests there were 21 million black residents of Alabama in 2012.
So if the number of blacks in Alabama is increasing and the population of black people in Southern states is increasing, then that means there is more problems with reconstruction of the Southern Confederacy. The Census shows that about 19% of black people in Alabama live in the Northern states: that is a 1 in 26.5 population rate. That is more than double that of 1.37 in the Northern states and 1.41-1.39 in the southern states. That is probably because there are about three million Negroes who live in the northern states—in fact there are more than 600,000 in Alabama. So the Negro population in Alabama had more than half the black people in Alabama in the 1960s and 1970s. By then it had almost tripled. But that was before the Civil War. The average white person in Alabama has about 2.35 lives in this family. (Bureau of Public Safety statistics). That’s a 1 in 28 African-American baby boomers. And, for those who are going to the polls in the next two years, maybe a 3 or 4 percent rise in the number of whites will have not only negative effects on the
The secret organizations that sprang up after the war also were a detriment to reconstruction. They were trying to bring the south back as close as possible to slavery with heir extreme segregation. They used murder, and arson to make their point, and punished any freed slave that thought they were equal to the Whites. Terror by the white groups kept the south from becoming an industrial giant like the north, they did not have the man power after the war, and they lost too many men. The freed slave knew more about farming than industrial work. The black codes were a huge detriment to reconstruction, preventing any Black person from purchasing, or renting land in some states which was a big roadblock for reconstruction. (Schultz 2012).
In summary, reconstruction was not radical; I believe it was radical in the wrong way. President Johnson, and the radical were the main stumbling block to reconstruction. The radical republicans in Congress were not effective enough their battles with Johnson made some changes, but when Grant was elected, it was never going to work. The radical in the south were never going to change, and Grant was not interested enough for a big fight, which it would have been. I believe if Lincoln had not been assassinated, it might have been different. I do not think full reconstruction was completed until the 1960s.
The post-Civil War South has been called the New South. In what ways did it succeed in reinventing