Yet from 1863 forward, the North had fought and won a war in defense of free labor, which they insisted the South adopt. How, then, was plantation agriculture, which was the key to economic development in the South, to be re-established?.
Reconstruction, generally defined, as the period from 1865-1877, was the battlefield on which these competing logics confronted each other on where freed people's place in American society would initially be defined. Even though the North was victorious, the freedmen celebration was short lived. Reconstruction may have sounded great, in the beginning, for African-Americans but despite the freedom, they were granted, they were worse off than before the war. A war that was so heroically fought and so victoriously ended shall pass into history a miserable failure. Northern political ideology had long believed that all men were created equal, but now that slaves were no longer slaves, a serious question arose. Will freedmen be considered men, and therefore equal? How was that to compare with the logic in white America, that Blacks were inherently inferior? Reconstruction failed because political institutions and the courts declined to enforce the laws, which would have kept African-Americans from being disenfranchised. If ignorance was the bases on which they used to disenfranchised African-Americans, then the laws were based upon discrimination against color. The government was saying in effect, that ignorant, loyal men who are black are not fit to vote, but ignorant" loyal men who are white are. [Under Johnson's Reconstruction policy, as white Southern states re-established their governments, which in DuBois words, "looked backwards" toward slavery.] The simple fact was that confederate military surrender had not changed the outlook of white Southerners, particularly the planters, in any basic way. "Although the freedmen were no longer considered the property of the individual master, they were considered the slaves of society.
