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The period began with a promising political revolution. Largely as a result of the radical political vision of two Republican leaders, Representative Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania and Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, the freedom were enfranchised and federal troops were sent into the South to protect them in the exercise of the fundamental rights of American citizens. With the passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments and a Civil Rights act, which was a great deal stronger than the act passed in 1865, Reconstruction came to a legal climax.

But this legislation, so similar to the legislation of our day, only touched the surface of the problem. No one knew this better than the freedmen who saw clearly that it was necessary to complete the political revolution by a social revolution. And what this meant, in the context of that day, was "Forty Acres and a Mule." Thaddeus Stevens, an old white man from Pennsylvania who was the most powerful politician in Washington and who as perhaps the most relevant politician in the political history of black Americans, made a valiant effort to give the Radical Reconstruction program the economic thrust it lacked. But he was thwarted by the Paradox of Power. After repeated attempts to push a radical land reform bill through Congress, Stevens announced that the dream was stillborn. He had "findly dreamed," he said in a House speech, "that when any fortunate chance should have broken up for a while the foundations of our institutions, and released us from obligations the most tyrannical that ever man imposed in the name of freedom," that American institutions would have been so remodeled "as to have freed them from every vestige of human oppression, or inequality of rights, or recognized degradation of the poor, and the superior caste of the rich." But, alas, he said, bowing to the inherent limitations of the system, this "bright dream has vanished like the baseless fabric of a vision."