It ended too soon to complete the transformation of the South. The cause was abandoned not by Republicans, who welcomed African-American votes, but by the Northern elite who had concluded that the formal end of slavery was all that the free man needed and by their lack of preparation for ex-slaves to participate in the Southern Commonwealth. was obvious. Racism, a severe economic depression, an exhausted North and a troubled South, and a campaign of organized violence against freed man, overthrew Reconstruction. The North withdrew the last federal troops with the adoption of the Compromise of 1877. Freed slaves continued to exercise little voting rights until 1890, but they were soon stripped of all political, social, and economic power. It wasn't until the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s that the freedoms our Republican ancestors fought for nearly 100 years earlier were finally realized..