ABSTRACT
During the period between 1866 and 1871, Radical Republicans had hefted the full weight of the federal government and its armed forces behind reconstructing the South. The Reconstruction Amendments, the Freedmen’s Bureau, the Military Reconstruction Acts, and laws to quash racial violence aided the freedpeoples in practical and symbolic ways. Violence against blacks had quietened, although it lay just beneath the surface of southern society. Ex-slaves voted by the thousands, helping to elect a cadre of black politicians at the local, state, and national level. Former white Confederates were disfranchised and largely prevented from undertaking the worst expressions of racial control. Black literacy rates rose, as generations of former slaves learned in schools established by missionaries and the Freedmen’s Bureau. Southern Republicans for the first time appeared as a viable political power to compete with southern Democrats. The southern economy, though devastated beyond imagination by the war, received infusions of investments from northern capitalists. While the South faced real and mammoth problems, from seething white hostility at federal intervention to a wrecked economy and the loss of millions of dollars invested in slaves, the brief period known as Radical or Congressional Reconstruction had made substantial progress in creating a New South.
