The period of Reconstruction is the era following the Civil War when the country set out to rebuild and to revive the economy of the devastated South. as the war ended, Lincoln faced the question of what to do with the states of the defeated Confederacy, an issue that elicited sharp disagreement among Northerners. Some felt that these states should make voters as well as freedmen of their slaves, and Lincoln said the important thing was to get these states back in their proper place in the Union. Lincoln was assassinated before he could do anything at all about the states of the Old South. Andrew Johnson, his successor, gave assurances that he would carry on with Lincoln's Reconstruction program, though he also gave the impression that he would deal more harshly than Lincoln would have with rebel leaders. The murder of Lincoln only added to that attitude.
The path of Reconstruction showed the tensions between those who wanted to restore the South and those who wanted to punish it. The tensions would be seen as between Presidential Reconstruction and Radical Reconstruction under the direction of the so-called radical Republicans. Reconstruction can be considered a success in some of what it accomplished, but those accomplishments never reached the level desired by both Lincoln and Andrew Johnson, for the latter was thwarted time and again by the legislature.
Franklin and Moss cite Howard K. Beale to the effect that Reconstruction cannot be seen as a regional issue but only as a national one:
It is an integral part of the national history, and one may find an explanation for strange events in Alabama not only in the activities of the people in that state but in the movements and transactions of citizens in Boston, New York, or Philadelphia as well. From 1865 to the end of the century, the United States was picking up the threads of its social, political, and economic life, which were so abruptly cut in 1861, and att...