Reconstruction failed for several broadly related reasons. Perhaps most important, internal contradictions within the Republican coalition emerged as the various wings of the party both achieved their prewar goals and pressed for additional policy concessions in the postwar period. As the interests of the different factions diverged, the party lost the revolutionary zeal that had attended its role as the agent of Union survival and increasingly became a broker organization within which political allies narrowly construed their interests. Factional infighting in the Reconstruction period also made the loyalty of each group to the Republican party more contingent upon the realization of their programmatic goals. In this new political environment, none of the major factions had a direct interest in radical Reconstruction save southern Republicans. Even the latter backed radical policies only as long as there existed some possibility that the national government might back up their tenuous hold on the South. As northern support for Reconstruction waned, however, even these southern Republicans sought their own separate accommodation with former Confederate nationalists.

The establishment of an indigenous loyalist group within the bounds of the Confederacy presented a dilemma for the Republicans from which they never escaped. On the one hand, the freedman could successfully resist resurgent Confederate nationalists only if a thorough redistribution of southern wealth made blacks economically independent of white plantation owners and merchants.