the era of reconstruction can best be described as?

Question

1 - a period of vicious and tyrannical rule of the south by the north
2 - a time of drastic reform
3 - an era for the southern middle class
4- the physical rebuilding of the south
5- an imporatn first step toward civil rights

Answer 1

4- the physical rebuilding of the south.

Answer 2

Boy, that's some rotten set of choices they gave you. It's all of these, plus more. "Reconstruction" was what we had to do after we'd finished the Civil War. And history has shown that if you're planning to prevent another one, the period right after a war is critical in the extreme. All we succeeded in doing was to destroy the ability of the South to mount a war again--at least not for a while--which wasn't a solution to much of anything except for the immediate threat to the Union. We were exceptionally lucky to have had several advantages right afterwards.

One was that the industrialization of the US, spurred by the War, was creating wealth like nobody's business. This helped matters in both North and South.

We also had our Frontier, territories that were essentially unsettled by anyone if you don't count the Indians, which nobody did. The guys who were brought up fighting for the Confederacy were the people who settled the Old West. The Romans found that the best way to deal with their great, victorious armies was to pension them off and give them farms in undeveloped areas of the land, that they should learn a way of life that didn't involve fighting. Essentially, Lincoln, Johnson and Grant did the same thing.

Yeah, we ruled the South, but the military dictatorship most of the Northerners wanted to establish there after the Civil War never amounted to much. Most people were given back their land, a mild pledge of non-violence was all that was necessary to restore voting rights to soldiers and officers of the Confederate Army, and the old Confederate states were never assessed reparations to the Federal government. This infuriated the more radical of the Northerners, but it saved us from another Civil War.

To get an idea of what happens if you do the wrong stuff toward your defeated foe, have a look at what Britain did to Germany after World War I. They screwed up so bad we got World War II only thirty years thereafter. The US took over post-war negotiations after WWII with the beneficent Marshall Plan, and we haven't had a war there since. This was because of lessons we'd learned after our own Civil War.