After the election of 1866, the Radical Republicans decided to break up the plantations and distribute the land to the former slaves. In spite of ferocious resistance from the plantation owners, and lukewarm support from war-weary voters in the North, the Union Army succeeded in carrying out the order. A revolution of sorts, it seemed, had come to the South.
Unfortunately, there was far more to operating a successful cotton farm than the willingness to work hard. The former slaves had little access to capital and lacked the technical expertise and the vast web of connections in the business and financial worlds that the plantation owners had developed over the years. As a result, most of the farms went under, and ultimately were repurchased by their former owners. The freed slaves became hired laborers or sharecroppers.
Radical Reconstruction was viewed as a noble experiment that had failed. Subsequent claims for reparations from the descendants of the freed slaves were rejected on the ground that adequate compensation had already been provided to their ancestors.