<P> Reconstruction was a significant chapter in the history of civil rights in the United States, and in economic history . After Reconstruction ended, the South remained a poverty - stricken "backwater" dependent on agriculture . White Southerners soon succeeded in re-establishing legal and political dominance over blacks through violence, intimidation and discrimination . Historian Eric Foner argues, "What remains certain is that Reconstruction failed, and that for blacks its failure was a disaster whose magnitude cannot be obscured by the genuine accomplishments that did endure ." </P> <P> In the different states Reconstruction began and ended at different times; federal Reconstruction ended with the Compromise of 1877 . In recent decades most historians follow Foner in dating the Reconstruction of the south as starting in 1863 (with Emancipation and the Port Royal experiment) rather than 1865 . The usual ending has always been 1877 . Reconstruction policies were debated in the North when the war began, and commenced in earnest after Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, issued on January 1, 1863 . </P> <P> As Confederate states came back under control of the U.S. Army, President Abraham Lincoln set up reconstructed governments in Tennessee, Arkansas, and Louisiana during the war . He experimented by giving land to blacks in South Carolina . By fall 1865, the new President Andrew Johnson declared the war goals of national unity and the ending of slavery achieved and reconstruction completed . Republicans in Congress, refusing to accept Johnson's lenient terms, rejected new members of Congress, some of whom had been high - ranking Confederate officials a few months before . Johnson broke with the Republicans after vetoing two key bills that supported the Freedmen's Bureau and provided federal civil rights to the freedmen . The 1866 Congressional elections turned on the issue of Reconstruction, producing a sweeping Republican victory in the North, and providing the Radical Republicans with sufficient control of Congress to override Johnson's vetoes and commence their own "Radical Reconstruction" in 1867 . That same year, Congress removed civilian governments in the South, and placed the former Confederacy under the rule of the U.S. Army . The army conducted new elections in which the freed slaves could vote, while whites who had held leading positions under the Confederacy were temporarily denied the vote and were not permitted to run for office . </P> <P> In ten states, coalitions of freedmen, recent black and white arrivals from the North (carpetbaggers), and white Southerners who supported Reconstruction (scalawags) cooperated to form Republican biracial state governments . They introduced various reconstruction programs including: funding public schools, establishing charitable institutions, raising taxes, and funding public improvements such as improved railroad transportation and shipping . Conservative opponents called the Republican regimes corrupt and instigated violence toward freedmen and whites who supported Reconstruction . Most of the violence was carried out by members of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), a secretive terrorist organization closely allied with the southern Democratic Party . Klan members attacked and intimidated blacks seeking to exercise their new civil rights, as well as Republican politicians in the south favoring those civil rights . One such politician murdered by the Klan on the eve of the 1868 presidential election was Republican Congressman James M. Hinds of Arkansas . Widespread violence in the south led to federal intervention by President Ulysses S. Grant in 1871, which suppressed the Klan . Nevertheless, white Democrats, calling themselves "Redeemers", regained control of the south state by state, sometimes using fraud and violence to control state elections . A deep national economic depression following the Panic of 1873 led to major Democratic gains in the North, the collapse of many railroad schemes in the South, and a growing sense of frustration in the North . </P>

Who supervised elections in the south during reconstruction