Reconstruction: Failure or Success? Chapter 22-23 Name: ______

Directions: (1) Evaluate the major arguments each side makes as to whether Reconstruction was a failure or success. You will be responding in fairly short argumentative papers that argues Reconstruction was a FAILURE separately from being seen as a SUCCESS.

** Pick 2 statements from each category below (you will need 4 statements total – 2 for success ad 2 for failure) to use in your argumentative paper(s).

Length: 400 words for each paper.

Title – Reconstruction: Success /Failure

*THESIS – You MUST get your thesis approved before moving on. How to properly construct a thesis has been discussed in class.

**DO NOT DIRECTLY QUOTE THE BELOW STATEMENT. GAIN A GENERAL UNDERSTANDING OF THE TOPIC DISCUSSED BELOW.

“Reconstruction was a failure”

(1) Federal and state governments failed to secure the rights guaranteed to former slaves by constitutional Amendments.

(2) State Republican parties could not preserve black-white voter coalitions that would have enabled them to stay in power and continue political reform.

(3) Radical Republican governments were unable and unwilling to enact land reform or to provide former slaves with economic resources needed to break the cycle of poverty.

(4) Racial bias was a national, not regional, problem. Northerners were more concerned with the supremacy of the federal government and the Northern economy.

(5) The Jim Crow era in the South proved the Reconstruction as a disaster.

(6) Former slaves found themselves once again in a subordinate position in society.

(7) “Whether measured by the dreams inspired by emancipation or the more limited goals of securing African American rights as citizens….Reconstruction can only be judged as afailure.”

- Eric Foner

“Reconstruction was a success”

(1) Reconstruction was an attempt to create a social and political revolution despite economic collapse and the opposition of much of the white South.

(2) African Americans, only a few years removed from slavery, participated at all levels of government.

(3) State governments had some success in solving social problems: for example, they funded public school systems to all citizens, funded the Freedmen’s Bureau and allowed numerous opportunities for African Americans to gain strength in mainstream society.

(4) The breakup of the plantation system and slavery allowed, to some, redistribution of land (1866 Southern Homestead Act, tenant farming and sharecropping)

(5) Congress and Radical Republicans passed the 14th and 15th Amendments, which provided a constitutional foundation for important civil rights legislation.

(6) “It was the African American loyalty and the African American vote alone that restored the South to the Union; established the new democracy, both for white and African American. Despite the loss of ground that followed Reconstruction, African Americans succeeded in carving out a measure of independence within Southern society.

- W.E.B. Dubois