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 writing a very short argumentative paper that will argue that Reconstruction was a
FAILURE separately from your argument that Reconstruction was a SUCCESS. ** Pick 2 statements from
each category below (you will need 4 statements total) to use in your argumentative paper.
Length: 1 page per argument (2 total pages).
**Failure or Success: 1 page should be single spaced (pick the one you feel more comfortable with) and
double space the other side.
“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 a failure.”
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