This is free excerpt of Episode 4. To hear the entire series, join Slate Plus --> slate.com/reconstruction

Formerly enslaved black Americans held a majority of the seats in South Carolina’s state Legislature in 1868, and no other state elected as many black Americans during the Reconstruction era. How successfully did these politicians wield their newfound power? And compared to other eras, was political corruption really as endemic as white Americans claimed? 

In Episode 4 of Reconstruction: A Slate Academy, Rebecca Onion and Jamelle Bouie are joined by Kate Masur, the author of An Example for All the Land: Emancipation and the Struggle Over Equality in Washington, D.C., to explore the new political order that surfaced briefly in South Carolina and other Southern states after the Civil War.