The South won reconstruction. There were various southern partisans that harassed the Northern occupation forces the entire time. It came to a head when Wade Hampton won the governorship of South Carolina following a wave of bloody street fighting. He subtly threatened to kick off a second round of open warfare if the North didn't leave, so they did.

Many Northerners had grown sympathetic to the South as they were being tyrannized by the occupation forces. Ironically by the end, the North had adopted the Southern view of race and the South took up Northern economics. This all tends to get glossed over because, in the post-colonial framework of the New Left, the South inevitably appears as the subaltern fighting for liberation from Northern colonialism.