General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: The South was not sufficiently punished after the war [View all]thucythucy
(8,069 posts)and efforts to bring education and empowerment to poor whites and emancipated slaves happened during the first few years after the war, during the administration of Andrew Johnson. A southerner, Johnson himself opposed most of these reforms, which were carried out in spite of him. Public schools, some land redistribution, protection of black voter rights--it wasn't nearly enough, but it was a start in the right direction.
As for corruption, the reconstructed state governments of 1865-1870, which included for the first time (and for last time until the 1970s) African American elected officials, were among the LEAST corrupt state administrations in southern history. The idea that Reconstruction was an era of corrupt "carpetbaggers" and "scalliwags" is southern revisionist history.
Rather that Wikipedia's couple of paragraphs on "forty acres and a mule" I'd recommend David Blight's "Race and Reunion," not to mention the work James McPherson has done on the topic.
What "complicated" the situation was that the same white racists who started the war were left with their landed estates--source of their wealth--largely intact, and were able after a few short years--with the aid of terrorist violence--to reassert control, thus condemning thousands of innocent people to death by lynching and other violence, and entire generations to the American version of apartheid.
That so many Americans still seek to paper over this history is a part of our continuing problems with racism today.