What would it take for reconstruction to be successful? Success is here defined as:
1. Full legal equality between blacks and whites in the south (or at least basic protections, so whites can't just kill blacks and get away with it)
2. Land reform of the big plantations to benefit freed slaves and poor whites
3. The creation of a stable and secure black middle class that is not forced to limit its business to its own community.
It would probably need ASB intervention.
1) In theory the 14th Amendment did give them that. But of course it meant nothing w/o the will to enforce it, and such a will did not exist and couldn't be made to exist.
2) Politically impossible. Indeed, even when land did get seized (as huge amounts were due to tax default etc) there was no will to use it in that way. It was just auctioned.
Also, even if the intervention of a Fairy Godmother
did somehow bring it about, it would probably have achieved little. For obvious reasons, very few Freedmen had any money, so that the practical effect would be to turn penniless sharecroppers into penniless subsistence farmers. And farmers with no money are rarely able to hang on to their land for very long. All this w/o even considering what the KKK and like-minded bodies would be doing to any Freedman rash enough to move onto confiscated land. The most likely result, as the poor Blacks (and poor Whites) were bought out by wealthier men, would be to replace one set of planters by another, and even if some of these were of northern origin, after a generation or two in the South they would probably be just as racist as their Southern neighbours - if indeed they weren't that way to start with.
3) Same problem. How many Southern Blacks could acquire the money to join this "middle class"?