ABSTRACT
Nine years after the Civil War ended, when it had become clear that most black people though no longer slaves would remain in subserviency throughout the South, there was an abolitionist reunion in Chicago. Several aging abolitionists who attended lamented that their tactic of peaceful persuasion had been superseded by armed conflict as the means of ending slavery. Violence, they suggested, could not solve the nation’s racial dilemma [212]. Historians have tended to agree with this assessment and have used it to help explain the failure of Reconstruction to achieve real equality for African Americans.
