The Southern states were in political and economic ruins after the civil war.

Discuss the reality of the reconstructed south with special reference to the situation of the freed slaves in that part of the country The Southern states were in political and economic ruins after the civil war. Several difficult decades of reconstructing the south lay ahead. In the short term, the Federal and state governments needed to plan for the adoption of new state constitutions, new land policies, and rights of suffrage. The reform of the …

…importantly, the fact that the offices provided assistance to the unemployed was seen as encouragement to be "idle." The structural transformation of American society formed by the civil war dramatically outpaced the changes in americans' racial attitudes. In many ways, the promised of emancipation would not be legally realized until the civil rights movement of the 1960s. To the current day, of course, the tensions of racial coexistence continue to perplex and frustrate the culture.