Without land of their own, the freedmen were effectively marooned in the postwar South, fated to assume quasi-slave status as tenants of their former masters, poised to become victims of Jim Crow policies once federal troops were withdrawn in 1877. In retrospect, what was economically essential to implement a racial revolution was politically impossible, because the vast majority of white citizens, North and South, found the wholesale transfer of property from whites to blacks unimaginable.
