What are 3 outcomes as a result of reconstruction? - Answers

The north got what it really wanted: The union was saved, and the federal properties in the south were back in the possession of the federal government. Freed blacks were abandoned and allowed to drift back into virtual slavery, because ending slavery was never the reason the north mounted military operations against the south. It was not a healing time. It was a time in which the Republican-dominated Congress forced some harsh conditions upon the south. Andrew Johnson wanted to carry on with Lincoln's relatively benign policies toward the post-war south, but Congress was in a mood for vengeance, so they impeached Johnson on trumped up charges in an attempt to neutralize his influence. Later, when Grant became president, he sent U.S. troops south to enforce the integration laws just as Eisenhower did almost one hundred years later, but the northern population and certainly the southern population were not yet ready for such federal action, so every president backed off of such action until Eisenhower tried it. This attempt to use force to integrate blacks into mainstream society is a large part of the reason Grant was considered our worst president for so many years. (His brother stealing money from the Bureau of Indian Affairs didn't help President Grant's reputation any.) Back then, reconstruction was a reference to reconstructing the Union; as soon as all of the Confederate states had been re-admitted to the Union, people back then considered reconstruction completed. It wasn't until later that reconstruction started to take on connotations of social reconstruction and integration.