Kindness and good government? South Carolina didn't finish paying off the last of its debts from Reconstruction until 1954. The Yankees stole everything that wasn't nailed down. They taxed nearly every plantation into bankruptcy. They closed every manufacturing business. They borrowed against the public credit until they couldn't get anymore. Then they went home. Yeah, it was good government for somebody all right.
Jim Crow didn't begin until after reconstruction.
In the United States, the most notorious Black Codes were laws passed by Southern states in 1865 and 1866, after the Civil War. These laws had the intent and the effect of restricting Black people’s freedom, and of compelling them to work in a labor economy based on low wages or debt.
First paragraph in Wikipedia under the subject “Black Codes”.
The defining feature of the Black Codes was vagrancy law which allowed local authorities to arrest the freedpeople and commit them to involuntary labor.
The Black Codes outraged public opinion in the North because it seemed the South was creating a form of quasi-slavery to negate the results of the war.[108] When the Radical 39th Congress re-convened in December 1865, it was generally furious about the developments that had transpired during Johnson’s Presidential Reconstruction. The Black Codes, along with the appointment of prominent Confederates to Congress, signified that the South had been emboldened by Johnson and intended to maintain its old political order.[109] Railing against the Black Codes as returns to slavery in violation of the Thirteenth Amendment, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866, the Fourteenth Amendment, and the Second Freedmen’s Bureau Bill.[110]
The Memphis Riots in May 1866 and the New Orleans Riot in July brought additional attention and urgency to the racial tension state-sanctioned racism permeating the South.[110]
After winning large majorities in the 1866 elections, the Republican Congress passed the Reconstruction Acts placing the South under military rule.
So, you are incorrect that Reconstruction was begun by Republicans to win elections. Rather, it was in response to the “Black Codes”, and only possible AFTER the Republicans had won a large majority.