Answer:President Lincoln's original goal in the Civil War was to hold the nation together. And in this, the war and Reconstruction were a success. The Confederacy was destroyed for good, and every state that had seceded was readmitted to the Union. In fact, the Civil War went a step further in terms of public thought. American historian Shelby Foote noted, 'Before the war it was said 'the United States are.' Grammatically, it was spoken that way and thought of as a collection of independent states. And after the war it was always 'the United States is,' as we say today without being self-conscious at all. And that sums up what the war accomplished. It made us an 'is.'The federal government outlawed slavery with the 13th Amendment, defined citizenship and protected all Americans under the law with the 14th Amendment and extended suffrage to all men in the 15th Amendment. Federal legislation, like the Freedman's Bureau and the Civil Rights Act, worked to get African Americans back on their feet and participating equally in the government, society and economy. Black men were elected to every level of government, including governors and senators.
The failures are though unfortunately, the overthrow of the South’s biracial governments, accomplished in part by terrorist violence, was followed by a long period of legally enforced white supremacy. Yet this itself offers a timely lesson – that there is nothing inevitable or predetermined in the onward march of freedom and equality. Reconstruction and its aftermath remind us that rights in the Constitution are not self-enforcing, and that our liberties can never be taken for granted..Reconstruction has long been misrepresented, or simply neglected, in our schools, and unlike Confederate generals and founders of the Ku Klux Klan, few if any monuments exist to the black and white leaders of that era. Fortunately, the National Park Service has just announced an initiative to identify ways of bringing attention to Reconstruction in its historical sites. This is an important first step in making Reconstruction part of Americans’ historical self-consciousness.
