The Radical Republicans Clash with the President
For some African Americans, the end of slavery came with the January 1863 signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, the document that proclaimed most of them free. For others, it came in April 1865 with the end of the Civil War (1861–65). This bloody, four-year conflict had divided the nation, pitting the Northern Union (federal government) against the Confederacy, the eleven Southern states that had seceded (broken away) from the United States. In any case, all of the four million former slaves rejoiced in their freedom.
The end of slavery did not, however, bring with it an easy solution to the problems facing black people. As noted in The Era of Reconstruction: 1865–1877, according to respected African American leader Frederick Douglass (c. 1817–1895), a former slave who fought first for the abolition of slavery and later for black civil rights, the freed people "were sent away empty-handed, without money, without friends, and without a foot of land to stand upon. Old and young, sick and well, they were turned loose to the open sky, naked to their enemies."
The enemies Douglass referred to were all around them, in the form of white Southerners embittered by defeat and unwilling to accept the realities of their postwar lives, especially their changed relationship with the black people who had been their unpaid laborers and servants.
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