Reconstruction was a good idea gone horribly wrong. If you study the civil wars of other nations throughout history, you'll find the winning side executing the leaders of the losing side, genocide, forced removal of people from their land, and so on. In the United States, however, none of these things occurred. Instead, a relatively benign reconstruction program was adopted which, in its concept, required the losing side to spend a little time in the woodshed, swear allegiance to the national constitution, adopt State constitutions which embodied the principle of equal civil rights to all citizens. A piece of cake when compared to the fate of the losing side in other civil wars.

The problem with Reconstruction lay with its implementation. The resources of the South were exploited by carpet-baggers, the tax system was manipulated so that family farms and plantations were essentially stolen from their owners, military administrators often became petty dictators, etc. Greed, spite and revenge were the order of the day. If Reconstruction had been implemented with honesty, honor and nobility, the South could have reentered public life revived, prosperous, and without rancor. As it turned out, though, it took decades for the South to begin to come out of the hole it was in. In fact, it's just been in our lifetime that the South finally achieved a position of relative parity with the rest of the nation.