The records of the Reconstruction still exist, and they document the history of the only honest governments the south has ever had. They politicians involved were better educated than southerners, and they took seriously the notions of not stealing and of developing the south instead of their own pockets. For the reason, the traditionalists of the South indeed viewed them with abject horror. To be honest, these state governments did benefit from the existence of the Freedman's Bureau which channeled northern funds directly to impoverished whites. The Bureau also ran southern schools. All this ended when the KKK systematically drove out the educators and condemned the south to another hundred years of it's great traditions of ingorance, poverty and illiteracy. The debts you speak of all started when the Democrats came back to power and raised funds from the states to compensate slave owners for their 'losses' even though share cropping more than made up for the losses for the wealthy few. Do you have any source whatsoever for this "information"? The only part I can see that might be true is the part about the Freedmen's Bureaus running Southern schools - the schools they ran were for black people, by the way, not all Southerners.