Skip to main content

What were the federal government’s goals for Reconstruction, and what steps did they take to achieve those goals?

The main goal of Reconstruction was to reunify the North and South.  Each state in the former Confederacy had to develop a new constitution that prohibited slavery.  The federal government had somewhat ambiguous goals for extending rights to the former slaves, granting them their freedom in 1865, citizenship in 1868, and suffrage for black males over the age of 21 in 1870.  When state governments in the South tried to get in the way of the black suffrage movement, the North started military Reconstruction under Grant, and this would continue until 1877.  There was also the goal of creating stable state governments in the South that were pro-Union, and this meant granting many former Confederate leaders such as Alexander Stevens their American citizenship.  This was controversial, as many considered the first Reconstruction president, Andrew Johnson, to be soft on the ex-Confederates.  The final and most important goal of Reconstruction was that it should end--the American people did not intend for the federal army to occupy the South forever.  Reconstruction ended with the Compromise of 1877 when the Republican Rutherford B. Hayes won the White House on the condition that the occupation army left the South, thus leaving the former slaves on their own.  

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Is there a word/phrase for "unperformant"?

As a software engineer, I need to sometimes describe a piece of code as something that lacks performance or was not written with performance in mind. Example: This kind of coding style leads to unmaintainable and unperformant code. Based on my Google searches, this isn't a real word. What is the correct way to describe this? EDIT My usage of "performance" here is in regard to speed and efficiency. For example, the better the performance of code the faster the application runs. My question and example target the negative definition, which is in reference to preventing inefficient coding practices. Answer This kind of coding style leads to unmaintainable and unperformant code. In my opinion, reads more easily as: This coding style leads to unmaintainable and poorly performing code. The key to well-written documentation and reports lies in ease of understanding. Adding poorly understood words such as performant decreases that ease. In addressing the use of such a poorly ...
Post a Comment
Read more

A man has a garden measuring 84 meters by 56 meters. He divides it into the minimum number of square plots. What is the length of the square plots?

We wish to divide this man's garden into the minimum number of square plots possible. A square has all four sides with the same length.Our garden is a rectangle, so the answer is clearly not 1 square plot. If we choose the wrong length for our squares, we may end up with missing holes or we may not be able to fit our squares inside the garden. So we have 84 meters in one direction and 56 meters in the other direction. When we start dividing the garden in square plots, we are "filling" those lengths in their respective directions. At each direction, there must be an integer number of squares (otherwise, we get holes or we leave the garden), so that all the square plots fill up the garden nicely. Thus, our job here is to find the greatest common divisor of 84 and 56. For this, we prime factor both of them: `56 = 2*2*2*7` `84 = 2*2*3*7` We can see that the prime factors and multiplicities in common are `2*2*7 = 28` . This is the desired length of the square plots. If you wi...
Post a Comment
Read more