There was a brief time during Radical Reconstruction when the creation of a liberal democratic South appeared to be possible. Its failure was inevitable, however. Why? Racism is only a part of the answer. The real reasons were that a large majority of whites in the South never bought into the vision of a multi-ethnic liberal democracy, and the taxpayers in the North, having borne huge costs from the war, were never going to keep large numbers of troops in the South for generations to impose liberal values on white supremacists. That’s not how we fight wars, even against Nazis. We win and go home.
The optimist looks at Reconstruction and argues that it at least planted the seeds for real change in the last half of the 20th century. That’s true, but it didn’t do any good for the millions of people who suffered through decades of oppression and stagnation. We look back and see the arc of history bending towards justice; they looked at the present and saw little hope for the future.
The failure of Reconstruction meant that the former Confederacy kept its backward Third World economy, run by and for a handful of wealthy landowners, for decades thereafter. Some areas still have it today.