At the end of the Civil War, the issues that most white Americans had with slave

Question

At the end of the Civil War, the issues that most white Americans had with slaves and slavery in general did not just fade away because the North had won the War. There were those who thought that the former slaves deserved the same rights as other Americans, while others thought that just because slavery had ended that did not make the former slaves equal to whites. While Reconstruction made it possible for some black people to partake in the political system and establish schools and churches, many lacked land on which to subsist and the Freedman’s Bureau was of little assistance. Despite the passage of the 15th Amendment and the Civil Rights Act of 1875, the Black Codes, Klu Klux Klan and the general attitude of many whites made life very difficult for the former slaves. 1. Discuss the successes and failures of reconstruction and whether you believe that overall it assisted blacks in their search for real freedom.

Explanation / Answer

Reconstruction is the name given to the period between the end of the Civil War in 1877 when the last federal troops were pulled out of the South. Although the
real process of reconstruction could not begin until the war ended, attempts at restoring the union were begun long before that. As far back as 1860 when the
Confederate states were in the process of seceding from the Union, the Senate Crittenden committee was attempting to find a way to reverse the process that had
already begun. They even proposed an amendment to the Constitution guaranteeing that slavery could continue where it already existed; it would have been the
13th
amendment.

The Legacy of the Civil War :

The Civil War was the bitterest war in American history by almost any definition. It has been called the “brothers' war,” the war between the states, or the
“War
of Northern Aggression,” and strong feelings about the background, causes, fighting, and meaning of the Civil War continue to this day. Over 600,000 Americans
died during the Civil War and another 400,000 suffered grievous wounds. Millions of dollars worth of property were destroyed, families were disrupted, fortunes
were made and lost, and the country that emerged from the war in 1865 was very different from the country that had existed in 1860.

Abraham Lincoln, considered by many to be America's greatest president, was viewed in the South past as an enemy at best, and at worst as a “bloodthirsty
tyrant.” One Virginia woman expressed feelings very common at the end of the Civil War when she wrote in her diary: “I stood in the street in Richmond and
watched the Yankees raise the flag over the Capitol with tears running down my face, because I could remember a time when I loved that flag, and now I hate the
very sight of it!” As Southerners viewed the history of the prewar years, secession and the war itself, they began the process of writing their own history of
those terrible events, and came to adopt what is called the “Lost Cause,” the idea that in the end the South had been right in its desire to govern itself and
its “peculiar institution” of slavery. The idea—or, as some term it, the “myth”—of the Lost Cause is still present.

Lincoln’s View of Reconstruction :

As early as 1863 president Lincoln began to think about reconstruction and offered a plan to allow states to begin to return to the Union in exchange
for relatively mild concessions. Following Union victories at Gettysburg, Vicksburg and Chattanooga, Lincoln hoped that at least some Confederate states might
see the handwriting on the wall and be willing to rejoin the Union if generous terms were offered. Thus in December 1863 Lincoln issued a Proclamation of
Amnesty and Reconstruction, which stated that those states where 10% of the 1860 electorate would take an oath of loyalty to the Union and agree to
emancipation might be readmitted.

Congress refused to recognize Lincoln's plan and countered with the Wade-Davis Bill, a much harsher approach, which the president vetoed with a “pocket veto.”
(Note: A pocket veto occurs when a bill is sent to the president, who does not sign it, but Congress adjourns within the 10-day period allowed for the
president to return the bill.) Lincoln did not back off from his intention to treat the South generously. In his famous Second Inaugural Address, which is
inscribed on the wall of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, he closed with the words:

    With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in;
to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and his orphan...to do all which may achieve and cherish
a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

Following Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, President Lincoln again outlined a generous plan for reconstruction. Sadly, the President did not live to see his
ideas realized. On April 14, 1865, Lincoln went to Ford’s theater to attend to play with his wife. John Wilkes Booth, a Virginia actor enraged by the South’s
defeat, made his way to the presidential box and shot the president in the head. Lincoln was carried across the street and placed in a bedroom, where he died
the next morning. Lincoln’s assassination dealt a fatal blow to hopes for a more lenient reconstruction effort than what actually occurred. His death also had
a chilling effect on potential sympathy for the South. Regarding Lincoln Winston Churchill wrote:

    Others might try to emulate his magnanimity; none but he could control the bitter political hatreds which were rife. The assassin's bullet had wrought more
evil to the United States than all the Confederate cannonade. ... [T]he death of Lincoln deprived the Union of the guiding hand which alone could have
solved the problems of reconstruction and added to the triumph of armies those lasting victories which are gained over the hearts of men.

Lincoln had been seen by many as a messiah, a notion enhanced by the fact that he died on Good Friday; even Southerners—those not consumed by
bitterness—realized they had lost a friend.

Vice President Andrew Johnson succeeded to the presidency upon Lincoln's death. A non-slave-holding Senator from Tennessee who had remained loyal to the north,
he ran with Lincoln on the Union Party ticket in 1864. Johnson carried a distinct animus toward the wealthy Southern planter class. He apparently intended to
carry out Lincoln's generous reconstruction policies, but his motivations were quite different from those of Lincoln. He was prepared to have wealthy
Southerners who had betrayed their country by serving the Confederacy dance to his tune. Powerful Republican Senators and Congressmen, thirsty for revenge and
wanting a proper transition to freedom for the former slaves, visited with Johnson during the months following Lincoln’s death in order to assess his attitudes
toward the defeated South. Initially, they came away satisfied that Johnson was on the right track. That assessment, however, would soon change radically. The
next phase of Reconstruction began when Congress came back into session late in 1865.

Reconstruction for all practical purposes took place entirely within the South. Restoring the Confederate states to their former positions as part of
the Union was a difficult process, and it was not completed successfully for a number of reasons. For most of the modern era the process of ending wars
involved representatives of the warring nations sitting down at a table and arranging some sort of peace. Depending on the duration, the intensity and the
issues over which the war was fought, peace settlements could range from harsh to generous. An unspoken but generally understood assumption was that the
warring parties would be likely to meet on the battlefield again, with the results quite possibly reversed, and thus over-harsh settlements were rare.

Such a resolution was impossible following the American Civil War for the simple reason that the two warring parties—the Union and the Confederacy—were not
held to be equal because the war had been fought over the Confederacy’s right to exist as a separate nation. The Union victory in effect ended the
Confederacy’s claim to political independence, and thus from the Union perspective there was no other party with whom to negotiate a peace settlement. That
meant that it was up to the federal government to decide exactly how the defeated Confederate states were to be treated. The conditions under which that had to
be achieved were less than propitious, to say the least.

The South: From Slavery to Freedom :

After the Civil War, the South faced a difficult period of rebuilding its government and economy and of dealing with over
three million newly freed African Americans. The tragedy of Reconstruction was that blacks and whites who tried to form a more egalitarian society in the
South lacked the means to achieve their aims. Many slaves who had been restricted all their lives had no "where" to go—although they were elated to be free:
the great day of jubilation, it was called—but this new state of freedom also caused confusion. Some stayed on old plantations, others wandered off in search
of lost family. Many slave owners were glad to get rid of "burdensome slaves" and threw them out "just like Yankee capitalists." Some former slaves,
especially in cities like Charleston, celebrated their freedom in ways that whites considered “insolent”; they put on fancy clothes, paraded through the
streets and showed none of their former deferential attitudes toward their former masters.

While some Freedmen celebrated openly, others, less trusting, approached their new status with caution. As they quickly learned, there was more to being free
than just not being owned as a slave. When asked how it felt to be free by a member of an investigating committee, one former slave said, "I don’t know." When
challenged to explain himself, he said, "I’ll be free when I can do anything a white man can do." One does not have to be a historian to know that degree of
freedom was a long time coming.

The Meaning of Freedom:

For African Americans, the most important single result of War was freedom—"the great watershed of their lives." Pertinent phrases
include: "I feel like a bird out of a cage ... Amen ... Amen ... Amen!" Freedom came "like a blaze of glory." "Freedom burned in the heart long before
freedom was born." The search for lost families was "awe inspiring." Some whites claimed that Blacks did not understand freedom and were to be "pitied." But
Blacks had observed a free society, and they knew it meant an end to injustices against slaves. Blacks in the South also had a workable society—church, family
and later schools. A Black culture already existed, and could be adapted to new conditions of freedom. Blacks also took quickly to politics. As one author has
put it, they watched the way their former masters voted and then did the opposite. Remarkably, Southern Blacks exhibited little overt resentment against their
former masters, and many adopted a conciliatory attitude. When they got into the legislatures they did not push hard for reform because they recognized the
reality of white power.

The Fourteenth Amendment :

In June 1866 Congress submitted to the states a new amendment to the Constitution. The Fourteenth Amendment was, in the context of the times, a truly radical
measure.
Never before had newly freed slaves been granted significant political rights. For example, in the British Caribbean sugar islands, where slavery had
been abolished in the 1830s, stiff property qualifications and poll taxes kept freedmen from voting. The Fourteenth Amendment was also a
milestone along the road to the
centralization of political power in the
United States because it reduced the power of all the states. In this sense it confirmed the great change wrought by the Civil War: the growth of a more
complex, more closely integrated social and economic struc-
ture requiring closer national supervision. Few people understood this aspect of the amendment at the time. First the amendment supplied a
broad definition of American citizenship:
“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they
reside.”
Obviously this included blacks. Then it struck at discriminatory legislation like the Black Codes: “No State shall make or enforce any law which
shall abridge the
privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without
due process of law.” The
next section attempted to force the southern states to permit blacks to vote. If a state denied the vote to any class of its adult male citizens,
its representation
was to be reduced proportionately. Under another clause, former federal officials who had served the Confederacy were barred from holding either state or federal
office unless specifically pardoned by a two-thirds vote of Congress. Finally, the Confederate debt was repudiated. While the amendment did not
specifically outlaw segregation or prevent a state
from disenfranchising blacks, the southern states would have none of it. Without them the necessary three-fourths majority of the states could not be obtained.
President   Johnson   vowed   to   make   the   choice   between   the   Fourteenth Amendment and his own policy the main issue of the 1866 congressional
elections.
He embarked on “a swing around the circle” to rally the public to his cause. He failed dismally. Northern women objected to the implication in the amendment
that black
men were more fitted to vote than white women, but a large majority of northern voters was determined that African Americans must have at least
formal legal
equality. The Republicans won better than two-thirds of the seats in both houses, together with control of all the northern state governments.
Johnson emerged from
the campaign discredited, the Radicals stronger and determined to have their way. The southern states, Congressman James A. Garfield of Ohio said in February
1867,
have “flung back into our teeth the magnanimous offer of a generous nation. It is now our turn to act.”

The 1866 Elections :

In August, 1866, the National Union Party, on which Lincoln and Johnson had been elected in 1864, challenged the Republicans for the
upcoming congressional elections. During the fall campaign President Johnson went on a speaking tour in opposition to the Radicals, but his maladroit
addresses simply aroused indignation and turned the voters toward the Republicans, who returned an overwhelmingly radical Congress. The huge Republican
victory gave them a 43-11 majority in Senate, and 143-49 in the House. With 3-1 majorities in both houses and veto overrides certain to follow, the Radicals
proceeded to take control of reconstruction—the president would be powerless to stop them. The overwhelming results rendered Andrew Johnson virtually
irrelevant.

Radicals in Power. The first item on the radical agenda was a determination to crush the old southern ruling class. Radical reconstruction soon became what one
historian has called a “states’ righters’ nightmare” and an “exquisite chastisement” of the South. The first Reconstruction Act was passed in March 2, 1867. It
divided the former Confederate states into five military districts and declared that the existing state governments were provisional only. The states were
required to call constitutional conventions with full manhood suffrage and to enroll blacks on voter rolls. They would then be required to ratify their new
state constitutions as well as the Fourteenth Amendment; then and only then would their representatives be readmitted to Congress.

President Johnson fought the Reconstruction Act by appointing governors who refused to vigorously enforce them. The states in turn stonewalled and refused to
comply, finding loopholes in the act to avoid their full execution. At the same time Congress passed the first Reconstruction Act, they also passed the Tenure
of Office Act and the Command of the Army Act. The Tenure of Office Act was aimed at keeping Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, a Radical sympathizer, in his
position. The act stated that Johnson could not dismiss cabinet officers who had been confirmed by the Senate without Senate approval. The Command of the Army
Act was designed to control the president by requiring all reconstruction actions to go through the Commander in Chief of the Army, General Grant, also a
Republican sympathizer. The two acts would later form the basis for President Johnson's impeachment.

Responding to Southern resistance to the first Reconstruction Act, in 1867 and 1868 Congress passed three supplementary Reconstruction Acts designed to close
loopholes in the original act Those acts granted more authority to military governors and allowed simple majorities of the voters rather than majorities of the
full population to decide elections. (Southerners tried to avoid the provisions of the Reconstruction Acts by advising white voters to boycott elections.)

The Reconstruction Acts, which President Johnson reluctantly carried out, resulted in what has been called “military reconstruction.” The military districts
were overseen by U.S. Army generals, and Union soldiers were still present in the South. The Republican party in the South grew strong, as some 700,000 blacks
were registered to vote, which meant that blacks comprised a majority of voters in many areas of the South. The Republican Party in the South also consisted of
former Unionists and northern Republicans who had moved south, the carpetbaggers, so called because of the cloth suitcases they carried. Many of those
northerners went South after the war for various reasons. Some went to help Blacks get an education or assist them in other ways. Some went because they saw
opportunities to make a fast buck. They were almost universally scorned by Southerners.

The Southern State Conventions were dominated by Radical Republicans, and blacks participated in all of them. The new constitutions were generally quite
progressive and often ahead of those of the North in terms of expanded rights. They guaranteed civil rights for blacks and excluded former Confederates from
high positions in government.

White Counter revolution:

The KKK. In the months following the end of the Civil War many whites carried out acts of random violence against blacks. In their
frustration at having lost the war and suffered great loss of life and property, they made the former slaves scapegoats for what they had endured. The violence
became more focused when the Ku Klux Klan was founded in December, 1865. The Klan and other white supremacy groups, such as the Knights of the White Camellia,
the Red Shirts and the White League, were well underway by 1867. The target of the Klan was the Republican Party, both blacks and whites, as well as anyone who
overtly assisted blacks in their quest for greater freedom and economic independence.

The result was what can only be called a reign of terror conducted by the Klan and other groups over the following decades. Thousands were killed, injured
or driven from their homes or suffered property damage as buildings were burned and farm animals destroyed. Blacks who tried to further the cause of the
Republican Party were singled out for attack, as were whites who, for example, rented rooms to northern carpetbaggers, including school teachers. Black men
were beaten within an inch of their lives or even to death in front of horrified family members. The fear of night riders often drove blacks into the woods to
sleep because they felt they were not safe in their own homes.

Former Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest, reported to be the first Grand Wizard of the Klan (though he claimed be never had control), formally
disbanded the KKK in 1868 because of increasing violence. Nevertheless, the group continued exist and to wreak vengeance upon freedmen and their white
supporters. Eventually the Congress passed Force Bills in 1870 and 1871 to control the violence and protect blacks from being deprived of their civil and
political, but enforcement of those acts was often lax, and other means of intimidation often proved effective.

Despite efforts to control the violence, lynchings in the South remained common throughout the 19th and into the 20th century. They were performed in public
to further intimidate blacks, who realized that they remained vulnerable, and that the perpetrators would not be punished, even though it was obvious who the
guilty parties were. Almost any action deemed unacceptable by whites could lead to a lynching, including looking too closely at a white woman, talking
disrespectfully to whites or simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The Fifteenth Amendment :

In 1869 Congress passed the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which stated that, “The right of citizens of the United States
to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” The amendment was
finally ratified in 1870, and well over half a million black names were added to the voter rolls during the 1870s. The Force Acts (see below) were further
attempts to suppress terrorist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, which had become strong enough to seize political control of some Southern states.

Although the Fifteenth Amendment was meant to ensure voting rights for all males, such devices as poll taxes and literacy tests were used to subvert the
purpose of the amendment. Poll taxes had to be paid two years in advance, and the financial burden was stiff for blacks. (Poor whites could procure election
“loans” to enable them to vote.) Literacy tests were used to restrict blacks, and alternatives such a passing a test on the Constitution were often rigged in
favor of whites. By the turn of the century, as a result of such things as amended state constitutions, grandfather clauses and gerrymandering, black voting in
the South had been reduced to a fraction of its former numbers. By 1910 few blacks could vote in parts of the South; thus, a vast contrast existed between the
earlier goals of the abolitionists and the reality of everyday life for freedmen in the South. This condition persisted until the modern civil rights movement
of the 1950s and 60s.

End of the Reconstruction Era: The Compromise of 1877 :

By 1876 many people both North and South had grown tired of reconstruction and wanted to forget the Civil War altogether. It had become apparent that the
problems of the South could not be resolved by tough federal legislation, no matter how well intended. In May 1872, Congress passed a general Amnesty Act,
which restored political rights to most remaining confederates. The Democratic Party was restored to control in many Southern states, and black voting rights
began to be curtailed by one means or another.

The election of 1876 was the vehicle by which Reconstruction was finally ended. The candidates were former Union General Rutherford B. Hayes of
Ohio, Republican, and New York Democratic Governor Samuel Tilden. The campaign was carried out by far less than above-board means, with corruption and treason
being some of the charges which the parties leveled at each other. Hayes was called to answer for the “crimes” of the Grant administration, while Republicans
continued to call the Democrats the party of treason. That charge became known as the “bloody shirt,” so called because of a politician who waved a
blood-stained shirt at a convention, blaming the South for the war. White supremacy groups helped spread pro-Democratic propaganda throughout the South. As the
campaign drew to a close, Tilden was regarded as the favorite, and on the final night of voting, even Hayes believed that he had lost as he retired for the
night. It soon became apparent, however, that the results were unclear.

The winter of 1876-1877 thus became one of confusion and bitterness as the outcome of the election was smothered in doubt. To this day it is not certain who
really won. When the electoral votes had been counted, the election returns in three Southern states—South Carolina, Florida and Louisiana—were in question.
Because of alleged intimidation and other reasons, charges arose that the election had been stolen in those three states. The apparent results gave those three
states to Hayes, which meant that he would have won in the Electoral College by one vote; but if any of those results were overturned, Tilden would have become
the victor. The question was: how could the conflict be resolved?

President Grant’s mediation in the affair helped avert a national crisis, but the country still faced a difficult and messy problem. Congress did what it
usually does when confronted with a political imbroglio: it formed a committee. Originally the committee was comprised of seven Republicans, seven Democrats
and one independent: five Congressmen, five senators and five Supreme Court justices. But when it turned out that the independent had become ineligible, he was
replaced by a Republican, and they now had an 8-7 majority on the committee.

When the returns in the three states were examined, the committee decided not to “go behind the returns”—that is, they decided to accept the results as
presented to Congress, in each case by a vote of 8 to 7. Thus all three states were given over to Hayes, but not without a fight. Democrats in Congress
threatened to refuse to accept the committee recommendations. That action would have thrown the nation into turmoil, with no new president to take office on
March 4. Behind closed doors, in smoke-filled rooms, a deal was hatched: In return for allowing the committee's recommendations and giving the election over to
Hayes, the Democrats exacted three promises. First, reconstruction would be ended and all federal troops would be removed from the South. Second, the South
would get a cabinet position in Hayes’s government. Third, money for internal improvements would be provided by the federal government for use in the South.

The irony of the situation is that President Hayes was probably prepared to do those things in any case, but the Compromise of 1877 was accepted. In April of
that year federal troops marched out of the South, turning the freedmen over (as Frederick Douglass put it) to the “rage of our infuriated former masters.”

Summary of Reconstruction :

The Civil War was the bitterest war in American history by almost any definition. It has been called the “brothers' war,” the war between the states, or the
“War of Northern Aggression.” Strong feelings about the background, causes, fighting and meaning of the Civil War continue to this day. Over 600,000 Americans
died during the Civil War and another 400,000 suffered grievous wounds. Millions of dollars’ worth of property were destroyed, families were disrupted,
fortunes were made and lost, and the country that emerged from the war in 1865 was very different from the country that had existed in 1860.

In the immediate aftermath of the war its most serious consequence was undoubtedly the rage that swept across the South, manifesting itself in bitterness and
hatred of all things associated with the Union—or the North. “Yankee” was a pejorative term, and “damn Yankee” was one of the milder epithets applied to anyone
who came from the far side of the Mason-Dixon line. The South saw a huge portion of its young male population destroyed, along with homesteads, farms, factories and
railroads. After all the sacrifice and suffering that Southerners had endured, they were back in that hated Union.

Naturally the rage and frustration felt by many Southerners needed a target or outlet, and unsurprisingly, that target was the freedmen and women, the former
slaves who now walked unfettered in the streets of Charleston, Atlanta, Mobile and New Orleans. Their very presence as free men and women further aggravated
feelings of Southerners like salt in a wound, and their wrath was often expressed by bloody and violent means.

Reconciliation of the two sections of the country came at the expense of Southern blacks and poor whites. North and South reconciled after 1877, but only
through the compromise that stripped African-Americans of their political gains and turned the South back over to the Redeemer Democratic governments that
sought to further legislation restoring white supremacy through Jim Crow laws and other means. The “New South” of the Redeemers would recreate as far as
possible the racial conditions of the Old South. The Southern economy was dominated by Northern capital and Southern employers, landlords and creditors.
Economic and physical coercion, including hundreds of lynchings, effectively disenfranchised people of color. Some blacks, justifiably bitter at the depth of
white racism, supported Black Nationalism and emigration to Africa, but most chose to struggle for improvement within American society. Over time, many
migrated north or west in search of better opportunities.

The results of the Civil War included the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments that ended slavery, created national citizenship for the first time,
amplified the meaning of the Bill of Rights, and attempted to provide access to the democratic process for all adult male Americans. They were, in the short
term, only partially successful at best.
As Southerners viewed the history of the prewar years, secession and the war itself, they soon began the process of writing their own history of those terrible
events, and came to adopt what is called the “Lost Cause,” the idea that in the end the South had been right in its desire to govern itself and the defend the
institution of slavery. The idea—or, as some term it, the “myth”—of the Lost Cause is still present.

In 1915 movie maker D.W. Griffith produced one of the most famous and controversial films in American history, The Birth of a Nation. In terms of its
contributions to the history of cinematography, the film is a masterpiece. With a running time of over three hours, it was long even by today's standards. A
black and white silent film, it nevertheless used color tinting for dramatic effects, employed hundreds of extras, and had elaborate subtitles and other
graphic effects. The film, however, was overtly racist. Its theme was the salvation of the reconstruction South by the Ku Klux Klan from rampaging former
slaves and northern opportunists. Race riots over the film broke out in some northern cities, and the N.A.A.C.P. protested in cities across the country.
Although President Woodrow Wilson showed the film in the White House and proclaimed it good history, in later times critics have condemned the content of the
film for its overt racism and historical inaccuracies.

Conclusion. It is hard but not impossible to say good things about reconstruction. In later years, some Blacks looked back on Reconstruction as “the good old
days,”—a time when anything seemed possible; two Black men served in the Senate, one in the House, and there were Blacks in most Southern governments. Their
goals were land, the ballot and education for Freedmen. Blacks did get the ballot, and education opportunities were provided. Congress could not support land
confiscation, however, as it was legally barred. There was no “Marshall Plan” for the South, but on the other hand, the South was not brutalized. Despite the
enormous problems of the Reconstruction era, the hope existed among many that further progress could be made. Many honest citizens, both black and white,
understood the challenges and worked to solve them; nevertheless, many goals were unrealized, and much of the progress that was made during Reconstruction was
reversed later.

Perhaps the greatest irony of reconstruction is that it had to occur at all in a legal sense. For four years a bloody war had been conducted to prove the point
that a state could not unilaterally leave the Union. During the years after the war was over, however, the United States Congress dictated terms under which
the states would be admitted back into the Union.

Like the Civil War that preceded it, the reconstruction experience changed life in the American South, and to some extent even in the north, permanently. In
the first place, the leadership of the old plantation-slave-owning aristocracy was undermined. It was a bitter pill for those who had shaped the fortunes and
destinies of most of the southern population. Although it existed in nostalgic memories for some time, the old South was gone. To some extent, the old
leadership tried to hold onto power through black codes and other measures. Neither did the Republican radicals in Congress understand the degree to which
Southern conservatives could conspire to flout federal laws. Furthermore, leadership at all levels, North and South, was insufficient to meet the extraordinary
challenges of reconstruction.

Although the “Black Republican” governments in the South were accused of corruption, dishonesty and shady dealings in government were typical of the time,
especially in the northern cities. Political leadership was insufficient to meet the challenges of government, and corruption among politicians was widespread.
In terms of how the federal government conducted business during Reconstruction, many historians have decided that the radicals were not radical enough; they
left too much undone, and walked away while the readjustments were still far from complete. When Frederick Douglass said, “you turned us loose to the wrath of
our infuriated masters” he might have said “former masters” Yet with the black codes and other legal and extralegal methods devised to control the population
of Freedmen, in a sense he was still correct.

In the end, Blacks after 1877 were in essentially the same situation as in 1865, when slavery was formally ended. With all the violence they had seen, they
must have wondered indeed whether their gains had been worth the trouble. Yet their considerable achievements should be recognized: Former slaves had
participated in government in high levels, including the United States Congress. The new constitutions they had helped write were more progressive than many in
the North. Many former slaves had managed to become landowners, had voted in elections and pursued educational goals. They had become part of the body
politick. But for decades, the hopes of most Southern blacks were not realized.

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