It ended too soon to complete the transformation of the South. The cause was lost not by the Republicans, who welcomed African-American votes, but by the Northern elite who concluded that the formal end of slavery was all the freed men needed and from their unpreparedness for the participation of former slaves in the Southern Commonwealth was evident. Racism, severe economic depression, an exhausted North and a troubled South, and an organized campaign of violence against the freed man overthrew Reconstruction. The North withdrew the last federal troops with the passage of the Compromise of 1877. Freed slaves continued to exercise few voting rights until 1890, but were soon stripped of all political, social, and economic power. Only with the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s were the freedoms that our Republican forefathers had fought for nearly 100 years earlier finally realized.