A fine but ultimately doomed experiment...

     Reconstruction was a fine but ultimately doomed experiment in American life.  The tragedy of this intractable issue was that there was finally no way for blacks to enjoy their rights without a prolonged military presence, and that became politically impossible.  Could even Abraham Lincoln have appeased the white south while simultaneously protecting its black population?  It seems unlikely.  Grant saw a double standard at work:  the country tolerated terror by whites, but not by blacks.  As he wrote after leaving office:  "If a negro insurrection should arise in South Carolina, Mississippi, or Louisiana, or if the negroes of either of these states . . . should intimidate whites from going to the polls . . . there would be no division of sentiment as to the duty of the President.  It does seem the rule should work both ways.
     Once Reconstruction collapsed, it left southern blacks for eighty years at the mercy of Jim Crow segregation, lynchings, poll taxes, literacy tests, and other tactics designed to segregate them from whites and deny them the vote.  Black sharecroppers would be degraded tot he level of debt-ridden serfs, bound to their former plantation owners.  After 1877, the black community in the South steadily lost ground until a rigid apartheid separated the races completely, a terrible state of affairs that would not be fixed until the rise of the civil rights movement after World War II.

-Ron Chernow,  Grant