Question

explain the reconstruction policy in points

Answer 1

Reconstruction was a failure according to most historians, but many disagree as to the reasons for that failure. On the one hand, black Americans earned many political and civil freedoms, including suffrage and equal protection under the law, during Reconstruction from constitutional amendments.

Answer 2

Reconstruction encompassed three major initiatives: restoration of the Union, transformation of southern society, and enactment of progressive legislation favoring the rights of freed slaves. President Abraham Lincoln’s Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction—issued in 1863, two years before the war even ended—mapped out the first of these initiatives, his Ten-Percent Plan. Under the plan, each southern state would be readmitted to the Union after 10 percent of its voting population had pledged future loyalty to the United States, and all Confederates except high-ranking government and military officials would be pardoned. After Lincoln was assassinated in 1865, President Andrew Johnson adopted the Ten-Percent Plan and pardoned thousands of Confederate officials. Radical Republicans in Congress, however, called for harsher measures, demanding a loyalty oath from 50 percent of each state’s voting population rather than just 10 percent. Although such points of contention existed, both presidents and Congress agreed on one major point—that the southern states needed to abolish slavery in their new state constitutions before being readmitted to the Union