The first challenge would have to do with the amount of refugees the war created in the South. In the countryside, lawlessness was commonplace as people were desperate for life's basic needs such as food. The Freedmen's Bureau was established to help both poor whites and former slaves get basic needs such as food, education, and healthcare. One of the best lasting legacies of the Reconstruction movement was that the South finally had a public education system that would serve the lower classes.
The next challenge concerned the former slaves. The Thirteenth Amendment freed them, but they could not vote, sue, or even own property in many areas. Many stayed on to work the plantations in sharecropper relationships with their former masters—this led to generational poverty not only for the former slaves but for the poor whites who entered into this as well. Many former slaves went North and West where they found that discrimination was a nationwide occurrence. Former slaves traveled throughout the South, taking advantage of being able to do this for the first time. Many former slaves also looked for family members who had been sold in the past. The governing whites in the South largely frowned up on this and created vagrancy laws which made it illegal for blacks to loiter or to travel without the proper paperwork. In many circumstances blacks were treated unfairly under the law and forced to work in chain gangs. Hate groups such as the Ku Klux Klan also worked to make sure that the "black codes" were being followed. While military Reconstruction helped the former slaves as Union soldiers ensured that they could vote, once this ended in in 1877, the pre-war white leadership took back over and passed laws that discriminated against black people.
The final obstacle would be the actual Reconstruction of the South. By not hanging the Southern leadership, the federal government hoped to create a conciliatory mood between the North and South. Northern investors invested in building railroads in the South, as well as building textile mills and ironworks in the region. There were also issues of ordinance close to major battlefields which had failed to explode. Harbors and rivers also had to be dredged and plantations which had been neglected during the war had to be renewed. All of this would prove to be very expensive, and the South was not rapidly restored; the region would remain poor until well into the twentieth century.
The most significant challenges the federal government faced involved dealing with the massive population of freed African Americans after the war. There was never total agreement even in the North over a host of serious issues, including the extent of political rights for black men, the possibility of land reform for freedmen, and the role of the federal government in providing services (education, for example) for African Americans. The federal government sought to address these issues in several ways, including the establishment of the Freedmen's Bureau, the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1866, and the passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments that clarified, at least on paper, the legal and political status of African Americans. Complicating these issues throughout Reconstruction was the fact that many southern whites fiercely, often violently, resisted political and social equality for African Americans. The Ku Klux Klan and many other organizations waged campaigns of terror to maintain white supremacy in the South. While the federal government responded by establishing military districts in the former Confederacy and passed legislation targeting these groups, white elites eventually regained control of state governments, usually with the support of poor whites, and often by violence and voter fraud. Reconstruction ended by collapsing under the weight of these challenges, with one state after another falling into the hands of so-called "Redeemer" governments.
https://www.history.com/topics/american-civil-war/reconstruction
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