In the aftermath of the war, most people in the North genuinely wanted to put the conflict behind them. They hoped to bind up the wounds of war and return to the bustling prosperity that had characterized the last years of the antebellum decade. But the Civil War had unleashed forces of social change that went far beyond the expectations of all but a few Americans in 1860. The war was, in the words of Charles and Mary Beard, a “Second American Revolution.” Four million black Americans were now free, and they were eager to play a role in restructuring the defeated society of the postwar South. For a brief instant some leaders in the North were willing to make an effort to give them that role, but those efforts fell short. Radical Reconstruction was a bold experiment that failed.