Where does prematurely ending Reconstruction rank on America's list of greatest mistakes?

Where does prematurely ending Reconstruction rank on America's list of greatest mistakes?

About number 1

Reconstruction was a failure for a decade before it was officially ended.

Right below it's war for independence

t. Neville Thornberry

The reason it ended "prematurely" was because it failed. The South was in shambles, Congress was a mess, and blacks were still heavily prejudiced against.

It's failure came from refusing to confiscate the lands of slave owners and allowing the ruling, confederate-supporting upper class to continue as the dominate force in The South.

The North should have completely broken the back of the Southern elites and rebuilt society from the ground up, but they were too afraid of re-agitating them to ever fully commit.

Right after beginning slavery

>The North should have completely broken the back of the Southern elites and rebuilt society from the ground up

Northern elites themselves had no interest in doing such a thing, they wanted to keep the South in a state of colonial dependence and a source of cheap raw materials for northern industries. They had no interest in industrializing the South. No one but a few radical intellectuals in the North ever really cared enough about the black population to do what you think they should have done, not to mention confiscating land and redistributing it to the lower classes doesn't set a good precedent at the same time the working classes in the North are becoming more politically active and agitated. You ask the impossible.

That would give you nazi germany with reactionary, belligerent lower class types seizing power on the basis of injustices

yeah bro the government totally shouldve taken peoples property and given it to the poor people. That wouldve made everything better. Because the state stepping in to fix everything always works out for the best. Fucking communists make me laugh.

I'm not saying it would have been anything that would have practically happened, but if the question is "Why did Reconstruction Fail", that's your answer.

When the North retook the South, it was essentially hostile territory. From the ground up, it was a society vehemently opposed to the rest of the nation and who in fact had multiple violent insurrections against the new laws and constitutional amendments passed to support basic equality. Treating them as if you only had to reopen the State Capitols and call it a day is ridiculous; as history proved, allowing the ruling elites to remain in power allowed de facto slavery to return in the form of Sharecropping and continued aggression towards the North and the black/religious-and-ethnic populations.

The North would have been entirely justified in treating the old southern regime as a hostile element that had to be destroyed completely to allow any sort of Reconstruction to happen, but their own self-interests prevented them from doing so.

>The North would have been entirely justified in treating the old southern regime as a hostile element

Sure, if you don't have any respect for the Constitution.

Eh, they were in revolt. Should be lucky they weren't all executed. Instead the North said they couldn't be in state legislatures, but the shits did so anyways.

Why do commies always come the conclusion that the solution is always executing everyone who disagrees with you?

The South had literally just fought and lost a horrible, bloody War over their attempt to irrevocably shatter the Union.

When the War ended, the South was not a collection of 11 US States; it was the Occupied Territory of the Confederate States of America, a hostile entity which unilaterally declared war on the United States. The North should have imposed whatever regulations and actions it deemed necessary, including the ones I listed, before allowing the provinces within that hostile entity to rejoin the Union as States.

>just take the land lmao
Unless you want to permanently destroy relations within the country, this is a horrible idea and you completely lack perspective. Reconstruction wasn't about revenge, both sides suffered. Simply taking the land would only prove the Southerners right

Considering the war was fought over state's rights it was appropriate to offer favorable terms to the confederates.

By the Union's own legal theory of the war that was not the case, the CSA was always a fiction, the rebel states were never not states.

That was in fact a myth, created by southern historians in the late 19th century to help further their 'lost cause of the south' bullshit. Both myths actually persisted until the late 20th century. Modern historiography has shown that Reconstruction was pretty successful, but that the success was quickly rolled back once Federal troops left. The reason it ended was due to the stolen election of 1876, where Hayes got the presidency in exchange for a withdrawal of federal troops and the end of reconstruction.

>the war was fought over state's rights

>Modern historiography has shown that Reconstruction was pretty successful, but that the success was quickly rolled back once Federal troops left.

If something is only "successful" with huge subsidies and support from government, it isn't actually a successful or sustainable program.

This isn't about "Revenge"; this is about shattering the hostile society that fought a war against the United States and supported the violent armed insurrections against the Federal and newly elected State Governments. The ruling elite within the South would never support or even allow their society to rejoin the rest of the country, and so they should have been broken down and disfranchised. The North didn't, and that's why the festering carcass of the Confederacy continued to infect the South in the form of inherent and irreversible racism and why the region lagged so badly behind the rest of the country.

Bullshit; "Muh State's Rights!" was an excuse propagated during and after the Civil War to give an aura of legitimacy to a desperate power grab by the ruling slaveowning class who knew their days were numbered. The spark that led to the South's succession wasn't any sort of infringement on their rights, but the democratic election of a President whose Party stood opposed to the spread of slavery into new territories and the scaling back of laws that forced non-slave states to acquiescence to their southern counterparts.

"beginning slavery"

No one here "began slavery", since slavery was an established system since like....forever. Also the slaves came with the colonizers, it didn't originate on the continent.

To be fair, the Founding Fathers made a conscious decision not to settle the issue of slavery when establishing their new nation. It was kind of the original sin of the US that led to the inevitable bloody conflict that was the Civil War.

>state's rights

>mistakes
from which perspective?