NARRATOR
When Radical Reconstruction passed, there were still thirty-eight thousand federal troops stationed in the South. In Kate Stone's Louisiana, more than half the regiments were black.

AYERS
Women like Kate Stone look at this and see embodied in black soldiers their greatest fear. These black men, many of whom had been slaves only eighteen months earlier, they wear that uniform as if it's their right, as if they're Americans, too.

FAUST
For white Southerners, this is not just politics, it's about your very core being. Congress is going to do certain things, but there's almost a kind of guerrilla warfare of the domestic, of the local, of people just refusing to let society change.

WALKER
From the point of view of the white South, the Civil War was a tragic mistake. They had only defended what they understood to be their Constitutional rights; it was not that they had disrupted the Union, engaged in an act of treason. They felt the North was a vicious aggressor, committed to a perversion, which was black equality. This sense of grievance and sense of injustice only grew. That this was something not to be accepted.

NARRATOR
In North Carolina, the last legislature elected solely by the white vote adjourned. The legislators marked the occasion with a whisky punch party. Before long the state capitol was in a drunken uproar. With the ballot in black hands, many whites expected to give up their seats to former slaves. "We have lost all hope of escaping the vengeance of the Northern people, wrote one senator, "and all are preparing for the worst."

TUNNELL
What Reconstruction does by suddenly enfranchising blacks, it communicates the message that all of a sudden these people who have been part of the background scenery, who've been stage props, they're going to come onto center stage and be actors. And that is deeply disturbing to white Southerners and to many people in the North.

NARRATOR
Across the South, black newspapers exhorted every black man to seize the moment. "He owes it to the martyrs who have fallen to procure his rights," declared a Georgia newspaper. "He owes it to his God, who has wrought his freedom. Let the Republicans of the North know the strength and character of the colored vote in the South. Vote. Vote in spite of every threat." To freedmen, the ballot was sacred proof they were bondsmen no longer, but citizens at last.