 
despite strange doings in statehouses, the southern people of both races 
lived as quietly and as normally during reconstruction as in any politically 
disturbed period before or after. 
the defiance of the traditional caste division occasionally expressed in an 
official reception or in an act of the legislature was not reflected generally 
in common social relations. 
no attempt was made to destroy white supremacy in the social or economic 
sphere or to sanction interracial marriages. 
the political aggressiveness of the negroes, characteristic of the period, 
did not extend to other phases of human relations... 
negro officeholders who were aggressive politically were known to observe 
carefully the etiquette of the southern caste system... 
one of the accepted conventions of reconstruction scholars is that the 
carpetbaggers failed because their measures were excessively radical... 
a truly radical program would have called for the confiscation of land for 
the freedmen. 
land was the principal form of southern wealth, the only effective weapon 
with which the ex-slaves could have battled for economic competence and social 
equality... 
the dominant radicalism of the day naively assumed that a people's 
salvation could be obtained through the ballot and the spelling book... 
in another vital respect the so-called radicals of the 1860's lost an 
opportunity to attempt genuine radicalism. 
they did not try to destroy the greatest obstacle to the negroes" 
salvation, the southern caste system... 
no one was ever allowed to forget that race distinctions existed... 
a reinterpretation of the tax policies of the radical regimes suggests a 
new explanation of the odious reputations possessed by these governments. 
of course, a partial answer is that there was corruption and incompetence. 
illiterate freedmen were easily seduced by unscrupulous carpetbaggers and 
scalawags. 
but were these malpractices the most serious offenses of the 
reconstructionists? 
