The federal government abandoned Reconstruction in 1877, but Black people didn’t give up on the moment’s promise.
The historian who gave his name to the Dunning School, a group of scholars who decried Reconstruction, explained his objections to the United States government’s effort to establish racial equality in the post-war South.
“The civil war had given leave to one set of revolutionary forces; Reconstruction gave leave to another still more formidable. The effects of the first were temporary ... the effects of the second were permanent, and struck to the very centre of our forms of government.”
The Atlantic revisits Reconstruction.