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1865–1877
CONCLUSION Conclusion: Revolutions and Reversals 353
Revolutions and Reversals

The end of slavery in the United States was revolutionary. For former slaves, now
free, lives and livelihoods had to be remade. Foremost on the minds of many was
reuniting with family members separated by slave sales and war. New black com-
munities were built and old ones were renewed, centering on independent black
churches, schools, and enterprises. Freedpeople knew that to live independently,
they had to be literate, and they placed great faith in education. They learned eagerly,
and within a decade, dozens of black colleges were giving students a formal and
expanded education, including the opportunity to acquire job skills, such as teacher
training. Former slaves remade themselves, their families, and their communities,
but their hopes for economic independence faded as the reality of emancipation,
which had made them free but had not provided them with land, set in. Impover-
ished and pressed into labor patterns that resembled slavery, most became tenant
farmers or sharecroppers, dependent on white landowners, and many became
trapped in a cycle of debt.
When the Radical Republicans in Congress took control of Reconstruction
in 1867, their efforts to guarantee civil rights for former slaves effected a political
revolution in the South that had the potential for an economic and social revolution,
too. With black votes and officeholding, southern states wrote new constitutions that
created state aid for economic development, progressive tax and judicial systems,
much-needed social welfare institutions, and the region’s first public school systems.
But this so-called Black Reconstruction proved short-lived. Southern white opposi-
tion was unrelenting and often violent. By 1877, whites had regained control of state
and local governments in the South. As the Republican Party, now weary of the cam-
paign for black rights, increasingly turned its attention to economic development,
southern blacks in particular were left with shockingly little protection and dwindling
numbers of effective white advocates of equal rights for blacks. “When you turned us
loose,” Frederick Douglass chastised the Republican National Convention in 1876,
“you gave us no acres: you turned us loose to the sky, to the storm, to the whirlwind,
and, worst of all, you turned us loose to the wrath of our infuriated masters.” 47
Some southern blacks went west to build new communities or to serve in army
units that fought the Indian wars. Others sought work in the expanding factories of
the North. But wherever they went, they encountered prejudice and discrimination.
Although campaigns for desegregating transportation and schools resulted in the pas-
sage of civil rights laws, those laws often went unenforced. U.S. Supreme Court rulings
limited the impact of well-intentioned laws and constitutional amendments passed
during Black Reconstruction. In 1883, a revived National Equal Rights League, meet-
ing in Louisville, Kentucky, conceded “that many of the laws intended to secure us our
rights as citizens are nothing more than dead letters.” 48

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