Changes In The States After The Era Of Reconstruction

The first decade after the Civil War, also known as “the era of Reconstruction”, was a time of massive change in the USA. It was the time of the “Old West”, as we are used to seeing it in the movies – cowboys, buffalo hunters, and the construction of railroads; the symbol of prosperity in America. The North and the West grew richer and attracted millions of immigrants from Europe, who were looking for higher wages. Despite the fact that highly skilled workers were paid more than they would receive in their homeland, these were times of inequality, and poverty. These events blended together with those following the Civil War in the South, as the Era of Reconstruction unfolded. The political changes in the South are divided in two periods,
The speed of execution with which the new constitutions were penned and passed was dependent on the strength of the progressive black movement in the given state. Spontaneous lashes of white supremacy violence and personal slander were known to ruin lives and careers, and this would become prevalent to different degrees throughout the Reconstruction and in the future. Some states demonstrated humility in accepting the new realities, while other states such as South Carolina and Louisiana saw proponents of emancipatory policies faced with intimidation and death threats on a public and private daily basis. The war had practically not ended in these states, and it was only in 1876 that the last armed forces were removed from Florida, as a gesture of the newly named president elect Rutherford B. Hayes, who had won after a close and heated
Contemporary European critics argue that the Civil War was demonstrative of one of the failures of the democratic experiment in the United States, pointing out other civilized nations at the time which not only abolished slavery earlier, but did so with little to no bloodshed. The Civil War remains the bloodiest war in American history, and similar criticisms have been made of the Reconstruction efforts that followed. Historians argue that although noble and praised as one of the more honorable presidents, Abraham Lincoln applied little practical forethought to the problem of whether the slaves were in any way prepared for emancipation. Listless hordes of unqualified labor suddenly flooded the market in a manner which crushed the Southern economies. People who were forbidden by threat of death to read half a decade earlier were now expected be citizens, and many experts in the field claim that the fundamental problem of leadership doomed Reconstruction efforts from the start. They support this claim by stating the few politicians who truly had African American interests at heart were hopelessly outnumbered by greedy northern prospectors, looking to carve up the decayed ruins of Southern businesses among themselves. Not only were the freed men left to basically fend for themselves after the war, but the old aristocracy and Confederate