But thegenuine advances achieved during Reconstruction, such as improvedaccess to education, exercise of political rights, and the creation of newblack institutions like independent churches, produced a violent reactionby upholders of white supremacy. During the 1870s, the North retreatedfrom its commitment to equality. In 1877, Reconstruction came to an end.Many of the rights guaranteed to the former slaves were violated in theyears that followed.

Although Reconstruction only lasted from 1865 to 1877, the issuesdebated then forecast many of the controversies that would envelopAmerican society in the decades that followed. The definition ofAmerican citizenship, the power of the federal government and itsrelationship to the states, the future of political democracy in a societymarked by increasing economic inequality—all these were Reconstructionissues, and all reverberated in the Gilded Age and Progressive era thatfollowed.

But just as the American Revolution leftto nineteenth-century Americans the problem of slavery, the Civil Warand Reconstruction left to future generations the challenge of bringinggenuine freedom to the descendants of slavery.