Changes

Perhaps the most ironic aspect of Reconstruction lay in white hopes for freedmen. Jones notes such in her work ''Soldiers of Light and Love'', as many black communities chose African American teachers over white missionaries. Freedman wanted independence, privacy. Whites wanted freedmen to become like wage laborers in the North, adopting middle-class values. Freedmen focused more on land and the right to own their labor, to produce for themselves. In this way, sharecropping can be viewed as a compromise fought for by African Americans, while it failed to provide them with the economic independence they desired, it did grant them land and some autonomy. Thus, while this was a great change from the slave system, it failed to significantly change the lives of African Americans for the better, nor did it advance the southern economy. Woodman refuses to acknowledge this as revolutionary, “Instead of chronicling quantity we must rather assess quality: the problem is not how much change but what kind of change.”

So, how successful was Reconstruction? Foner argues that Reconstruction proved revolutionary for a period but ultimately failed. “Here, however, we enter the realm of the purely speculative. What remains certain is that Reconstruction failed and that for blacks its failure was a disaster whose magnitude cannot be obscured by the genuine accomplishments that did endure. For the nation as a whole, the collapse of Reconstruction was a tragedy that deeply affected the course of its future development.” Thomas views the final results of Reconstruction similarly but through a slightly different historical lens. According to Thomas, Reconstruction undid the revolutionary advances of the Confederacy, “Ironically, the internal revolution went to completion at the very time that the external revolution collapsed … The program of the radical Republicans may have failed to restructure Southern society. It may, in the end, have “sold out” the freedmen in the South. Reconstruction did succeed in frustrating the positive elements of the revolutionary Southern experience.”