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The American Yawp, Volume 2, edited by Joseph Locke and Ben Wright, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Read the original free This shelf’s study material is shared under the same license (CC BY-SA 4.0).
Chapter 2 · pp. 16–53
Reconstruction was the effort to bring the defeated Southern states back into the Union and to decide what place African Americans would hold in American society. This chapter follows the political fights over that question, the lives of freedpeople, the economic changes in North and South, the roles of women and Native peoples, the violence used against Black political power, and the collapse of federal support in 1877. This first part covers the political struggle between the presidents and Congress from 1863 to 1868.
Reconstruction began before the Civil War ended and lasted until 1877. Its big questions were practical as well as legal. Were the former Confederate states conquered territories or equal states? How would they rebuild their governments and economies? What did freedom actually give a formerly enslaved person? Underneath these questions were three ideas: citizenship, equality, and what freedom meant in daily life. Americans debated them more openly than at any time since the nation's founding. (pp. 16–17)
In fall 1863, Lincoln expected the Union to win and hoped to weaken the Confederacy by encouraging Southern Unionists. His plan was simple. Southerners could swear an oath of allegiance, and once 10 percent of a state's voters had done so, loyal citizens could set up a new state government. These "Lincoln governments" appeared in Union-held parts of Louisiana, Tennessee, and Arkansas. These were the same areas the Emancipation Proclamation did not cover. (p. 17)
The Emancipation Proclamation had a major limit. It freed enslaved people only in areas still in rebellion. More than 700,000 people stayed enslaved in the border states of Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri. Slavery also continued in Union-occupied parts of Louisiana, Tennessee, and Virginia. A proclamation could not end slavery everywhere, so a change to the Constitution was needed. (p. 17)
Congress passed the Thirteenth Amendment on January 31, 1865. It banned slavery everywhere in the United States, with one exception: punishment for a crime after a proper conviction. By the end of 1865, three-fourths of the states had ratified it. About four million people were free after roughly 250 years of slavery in North America. Section Two let Congress pass laws to enforce the ban. The crime exception, however, would later be used to justify systems such as convict leasing. (p. 17)
John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln at Ford's Theater on April 14, 1865, and Lincoln died the next morning. Vice President Andrew Johnson became president. Johnson was a Tennessean who favored states' rights and held openly racist views. His approach was very different from what Lincoln had planned, and it soon brought him into conflict with Congress. (p. 18)
Johnson's plan offered the South a quick return to the Union. Provisional Southern governments had to do only three things:
On everything else, state conventions could act without federal interference. Johnson pardoned nearly all former rebels. The exception was wealthy planters holding more than $20,000 in property, who had to ask him personally for a pardon. He hoped a new group of leaders would replace the rich planter class. In practice, the old elites often returned to power. (pp. 18–19)
Black Codes were state laws meant to control Black labor and behavior and to preserve the power relationships of the antebellum South. South Carolina and Mississippi passed them first, and other states followed. The codes gave Black people some rights, such as owning property, marrying, and making contracts. They also denied key rights. Black men could not serve on juries or in state militias. Courts would not accept Black testimony against white people. Orphaned Black children could be apprenticed to their former enslavers. (p. 19)
Vagrancy laws were a central tool. Under Mississippi's law, a freedperson had to carry papers proving they had a job. Anyone without proof could be arrested and fined. If the person could not pay, the sheriff could hire them out to whoever paid the fine. This put Black workers back under white control, which one scholar called "slavery by another name." The codes limited Black movement, criminalized leisure time, and pushed many people into unfair farm contracts. (p. 19)
The Black Codes and violent mobs attacking Black Southerners convinced congressional Republicans that Johnson's plan was not enough. When Johnson declared the Southern states restored, Congress refused to seat their delegates. Republicans then wrote laws to protect freedpeople. Some, like Thaddeus Stevens, truly believed in racial equality, but most were motivated by party interest. Black men's votes could give Republicans a strong voting bloc in the South, so many Republicans wanted them to have the vote. (p. 19)
The Civil Rights Act of 1866 was the direct answer to the Black Codes. It was the first federal attempt to define citizenship for all American-born residents, except Native peoples, and it barred limits on their fundamental rights. Johnson vetoed it, but Congress overrode the veto. (pp. 19–20)
The Fourteenth Amendment was developed alongside the act so that its protections would rest on a firm constitutional footing. The House approved it on June 13, 1866. Section One did three major things:
This showed that the federal government was ready to enforce the Bill of Rights against state authority. (pp. 20–21)
Johnson opposed the amendment and the Civil Rights Act because he did not think African Americans deserved equal rights. But in the 1866 midterm elections, Republicans won a two-thirds majority in Congress. That was enough to override his vetoes. In 1867 they passed the first Reconstruction Act. It dissolved the Southern state governments and divided the South into five military districts. To rejoin the Union, a state now had to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment, write a new constitution that let Black men vote, and end the Black Codes. Control of Reconstruction had passed from the president to Congress. (pp. 20–21)
Johnson kept obstructing Congress, so the House voted articles of impeachment against him. The Senate fell just short of convicting him, and he stayed in office. Even so, Congress had won the power to direct the next stage of Reconstruction. The states ratified the Fourteenth Amendment on July 9, 1868, which secured birthright citizenship and "equal protection of the laws." (p. 21)
By the 1868 presidential election, Congress had already passed the Reconstruction Acts. The Republican candidate, Ulysses S. Grant, a former Union general, promised to protect the new order. The Democratic candidate, Horatio Seymour, promised to repeal Reconstruction. Grant won most of the former Confederacy (p. 21).
Two groups of white Republicans helped him there. Both names began as insults (p. 21):
Neither group was the main source of Republican strength. Black voters were the backbone of the party in the South (pp. 21–22). Without their votes, Republicans could not have carried most Southern states.
Reconstruction was the first time African Americans took part in democracy on a mass scale. The starting point was low. In 1860, only five Northern states let Black men vote on equal terms with white men. In 1867, Congress ordered Southern states to end racial discrimination in voting. After that, Black men voted in large numbers and began winning elections across the South (p. 22).
The result was a political turnaround. The South had been all-white, proslavery, and Democratic. It became a set of Republican-led states where Black Americans held power for the first time in the nation's history (p. 22).
Black men also helped write the new rules. They served as delegates at the state constitutional conventions of 1868. They were prepared by decades of Colored Conventions, which were Black political meetings that trained leaders and set goals (p. 22).
One of the biggest achievements of these conventions was the creation of public schools. Before the Civil War, public schools hardly existed in the South. By the end of Reconstruction, every Southern state had a public school system (p. 22).
Republican governments also opened state institutions to both white and Black residents. These included hospitals, mental asylums, orphanages, and prisons. Access was often segregated, so the two races were served separately. The governments also worked for industrial growth, Northern investment, and internal improvements such as transportation projects (p. 22).
African Americans held office at every level of government (p. 22):
In all, more than two thousand Black men held offices by 1877, from local levee commissioner up to US senator (p. 23).
These officeholders had varied backgrounds. Some were born free or freed before the war. In South Carolina, Virginia, and Louisiana, many free Black men were wealthy and well educated, which set them apart from much of the white population. A few, such as Antoine Dubuclet and William Breedlove, had even owned enslaved people. Others, like James D. Porter of Georgia, had helped enslaved people escape or had taught them to read (pp. 22–23).
Most officeholders, however, had won their freedom during the war. Many were skilled craftsmen, ministers, or teachers. Examples are the Florida shoemaker Emanuel Fortune, the Mississippi minister James D. Lynch, and the Alabama teacher William V. Turner. For them, politics was a natural next step from the leadership they already held in their communities (p. 23).
Black political power depended on Republican control of Southern governments and on federal protection. When Reconstruction ended and white Democrats returned to power, almost all Black officeholders lost their jobs. A few local offices lasted in places with large Black populations. Large-scale Black political participation did not return until well into the twentieth century (pp. 23–24).
Land was one of the freedpeople's greatest hopes. Owning land meant independence from former enslavers. In January 1865, General William T. Sherman issued Special Field Order No. 15. It set aside land in Georgia and South Carolina as homesteads for freedpeople who were following his army. But Sherman had no authority to seize and give away land, so the plan never fully took effect (p. 24).
The Freedmen's Bureau, a federal agency, was meant to give formerly enslaved people land that had been abandoned or confiscated by the government. Even these grants did not last. In 1866, land left by ex-Confederates was returned to them (p. 24).
After that, Bureau agents held meetings across the South. They told freedpeople that the land would not be given and that they should go back to work for their former enslavers as wage laborers. The news was a shock. When Commissioner Oliver O. Howard brought it to Edisto Island, the Black residents protested. They said the government had promised them homesteads. They also asked how they could forgive a man who had flogged their family and was still trying to keep them helpless (p. 24).
Agents sometimes pressed freedpeople to sign contracts with their former enslavers so that crops would be harvested. Even so, the Bureau set up courts where Black workers could seek justice if employers abused them or did not pay them (p. 24).
The last hope for land redistribution ended when bills by Thaddeus Stevens and Charles Sumner were tabled in Congress. Even radical Republicans had limits. The party valued national economic stability more than racial justice (p. 24).
Many freedpeople wanted land more than almost anything else. Land meant independence from former enslavers. In January 1865, General William T. Sherman issued Special Field Order No. 15. It set aside land in Georgia and South Carolina as homesteads for freedpeople. Sherman did not have the legal power to seize and hand out land, so the plan never fully worked (p. 24).
The Freedmen's Bureau was a federal agency created to help formerly enslaved people. One of its early jobs was to give them land that had been abandoned or confiscated by the government. These grants did not last. In 1866, land left behind by ex-Confederates was returned to them. Bureau agents then held meetings across the South to tell freedpeople the promise would not be kept. They were told to go back to work for their former enslavers as wage laborers (p. 24).
The reversal shocked Black communities. When Commissioner Oliver O. Howard visited Edisto Island to explain it, the Black residents answered that they had been promised homesteads. They also asked how they could be expected to forgive a man who had flogged them and their family and now kept them helpless (p. 24). Later, bills by Thaddeus Stevens and Charles Sumner to redistribute land were tabled in Congress. This ended the last real hope. Republicans cared more about national economic stability than about racial justice (p. 24).
The bureau's record was mixed:
The Freedman's Savings and Trust Company was founded on March 3, 1865, by the white abolitionist and minister John Alvord. It was meant to be a savings bank for formerly enslaved people and their descendants. Republicans hoped it would teach habits of saving and "thrift" (p. 25). It was very popular. At its peak it had more than 70,000 depositors in 37 branches, holding about $57 million. Branches stood in Northern cities like New York and Philadelphia and in Southern cities with large Black populations, such as Jacksonville, New Orleans, and St. Louis (p. 25).
The white trustees, however, began making improper loans to themselves and their business partners. In 1870 Congress changed the bank's charter so it could operate as a commercial bank. After that, most loans went to white borrowers in and around Washington, DC. By summer 1874 about 2.9 million in their accounts. Congress held hearings, but no one was held responsible, and depositors had no way to recover their money (p. 25).
The bank's story shows how white Republicans' commitment to racial and economic justice was fading.
Reuniting families. Freedom meant the chance to rebuild families broken by sale. Many freedpeople left plantations right away to search for relatives. Newspaper ads asking for news of lost family members were still being printed around 1900. Freedpeople also tried to gain control of children who had been apprenticed to white employers, during the war or under the Black Codes. Many couples held formal wedding ceremonies. This fit the government's aim of making Black men responsible for their own households so that women and children would not depend on the state (pp. 25, 27).
Education. Learning to read was a top priority. Many people wanted to read the Bible for themselves, so tired workers attended night school and Sunday school. A one-room school might hold over fifty students aged three to eighty. Booker T. Washington said it looked like a whole race trying to go to school (p. 27).
Independent Black churches. Many churches doubled as schoolhouses, which made them central to the struggle for freedom. After emancipation, Black Southerners left white-controlled churches and built their own, shaped by their own needs. In the 1930s, nearly 40 percent of 663 surveyed Black churches had roots in the years just after emancipation. Many of the new churches were in rural areas and had never belonged to white churches (p. 27).
These churches were quickly joined into regional, state, and national associations, often with help from free Black Northerners and Midwesterners who traveled South. Groups like the Virginia Baptist State Convention helped make Baptists the fastest-growing denomination (p. 27).
The associations also faced tension. Southern rural churches liked inspired preaching. Urban Black Northerners wanted more orderly services and an educated ministry. This shows that Black communities were not all alike (p. 27).
Churches as community centers. Women changed church life by pushing for equal access to the pulpit, even though they could already vote in church meetings. Leaders such as Nannie Helen Burroughs and Virginia Broughton of the Baptist Woman's Convention worked to protect Black women from sexual violence by white men. Black delegates raised the same concern at early state constitutional conventions (pp. 27–28). Churches were often the biggest buildings in town, so they served as community centers. Ministers gained platforms that led many to hold political office. Groups like the Union League, militias, and fraternal orders borrowed church rituals and hymns (p. 28).
Elizabeth Cady Stanton saw Reconstruction as a chance for groups denied political rights, including women and Black Americans, to win them. In 1863 she formed the Women's Loyal National League, which petitioned Congress for an amendment ending slavery. The Thirteenth Amendment was a victory for that effort and showed women could have real political impact (p. 28).
At the Eleventh National Women's Rights Convention in New York City in May 1866, Stanton said Reconstruction was the chance to build government on "equal rights for all." That year the women's rights movement merged with the American Anti-Slavery Society to form the American Equal Rights Association (AERA). Its goal was universal suffrage (pp. 28, 30).
The AERA soon argued over whether Black male suffrage should come first.
The split became clear in the 1867 Kansas campaign. Stanton and Susan B. Anthony found that former allies were backing away from women's suffrage in order to win votes for Black men. In their disappointment they allied with white supremacists who supported women's suffrage, and many activists were dismayed that they appealed to racism (p. 30).
The Amendments divided the movement further. The Fourteenth Amendment gave citizenship to all people born or naturalized in the US, but it also put the word male into the Constitution for the first time. The Fifteenth Amendment banned voting discrimination based on race, color, or previous servitude, but it said nothing about sex. The AERA then dissolved. Stanton and Anthony formed the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA). Suffragists who backed the Fifteenth Amendment despite its limits formed the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA) (pp. 30, 32).
The NWSA then adopted the New Departure. It argued that the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments already guaranteed women the vote, because they made everyone a citizen and protected citizens' rights. About 700 women registered to vote between 1868 and 1872. Anthony was one of them. She was arrested, then tried. In 1875 the Supreme Court agreed that women were citizens but ruled that suffrage was not guaranteed to all citizens. This ended the New Departure and matched the Court's narrow reading of the Reconstruction amendments. Afterward, many suffragists, Stanton among them, dropped universal suffrage. They argued instead that white women's virtue at the polls would keep Black men in check, a racist claim (p. 32).
After the war, Southern women of both races worked to redefine their roles. During the fighting, many white women had done work usually left to men, such as chopping wood and running businesses. Upper-class white women had seen what life was like without a husband's protection, and many disliked it, especially with racial equality now possible. They hoped to rebuild the old social hierarchy and keep their status (p. 32).
Ladies' Memorial Associations (LMAs) were civic groups of white Southern women. They grew out of wartime Soldiers' Aid Societies. Their main job was to bury and honor Confederate dead. Their speeches and ceremonies also praised Southern men and Southern nationalism. The LMAs became the forerunners and keepers of the Lost Cause story (p. 32).
The Lost Cause tried to rewrite the history of the old South so that slavery's brutality faded from view. Its most lasting claim was that the Civil War was fought over states' rights. This is a misconception. Slavery was the real cause of the war. The states' rights story was a myth that protected the Confederacy's reputation (p. 32).
LMAs also created new holidays, such as a day marking Stonewall Jackson's death on May 10. On these days white Southerners could show loyalty to the Confederacy and signal opposition to Black rights. In this way, women took on real political roles in the South (pp. 32–33).
Black women wanted control over their own work and homes. This put them in conflict with white women and employers (p. 33).
The story of Gertrude Clanton shows how. She was a former plantation mistress who hired a Black woman to do her washing. She believed her payment had bought a whole day of the woman's labor. The laundress believed she had been paid only to wash one load, and she went home when it was done. Gertrude was frustrated. Washerwomen like this one set their own wages and hours. Many took laundry to their own homes so that white women could not watch them and white men could not threaten them sexually (pp. 33–34).
The same fights happened across the South. White Southerners demanded that Black women work inside plantation homes. They also used apprenticeship systems to put Black children into unpaid labor. Black women resisted by turning down jobs with unfair pay or conditions and by holding tightly to their children (p. 34).
Black women also formed clubs to bury their dead, honor Black manhood, and aid their communities. On May 1, 1865, Black residents of Charleston honored Union soldiers who had been buried in haste at a racetrack that had been turned into a prison. This ceremony is seen as a precursor to Memorial Day. About three hundred Black women took part, and they had belonged to the Patriotic Association, which helped freedpeople during the war. They later joined Decoration Day ceremonies and formed their own clubs (p. 34).
White and Black women faced similar hardships, but the results differed. Both groups welcomed home brothers, husbands, and sons. Yet couples who had been apart for years because of war or slavery found it hard to readjust, and many men returned wounded in body or mind. Poverty and debt spread through the whole South. Among white families, suicide and divorce became more accepted. Among Black families, the opposite happened (p. 34).
Violence destroyed hopes for a biracial democracy. Many white Southerners could hardly imagine free Black labor. In 1865 Carl Schurz reported that most of them believed Black people could not be made to work without physical force. Violence had once enforced slavery and racial difference. Now it was used to block Black advancement and bring back the old order (pp. 34–35).
Slavery had been the basis of Southern society, labor, and ideas of white supremacy. When it ended, whites tried to reassert control through Black Codes and terror (p. 35).
Violence took three main forms (p. 36):
The Ku Klux Klan was organized in 1866 in Pulaski, Tennessee. By 1868 it had spread to nearly every former Confederate state. Many members came from the old Southern elite, and some Klan groups overlapped with criminal gangs or ex-Confederate guerrillas (pp. 36–37). The name became so well known that other groups, such as the White Line and the Knights of the White Camellia, were also called "Ku Kluxers." They formed one web of terror. In Panola County, Mississippi, twenty-four Klan-style murders occurred from August 1870 to December 1872. In nearby Lafayette County, Klansmen drowned thirty Black people at once. White Republicans were also targets, as in the beating of sheriff Allen Huggins. Perhaps dozens of Republican politicians were killed, and thousands of people were whipped, raped, or murdered (p. 37).
Congress passed the Enforcement Acts in 1870–1871. They made it a crime to deny African Americans their civil rights. They treated Klan violence as rebellion against the United States and allowed troops to protect freedpeople. For a while this suppressed the Klan. But by 1876, as Democrats took back control of Southern governments, federal opposition faded, and Black Southerners remained trapped under white supremacy (p. 37).
White conservatives answered critics by saying Republicans were "waving a bloody shirt." They meant that the violence was made up, exaggerated, or an unavoidable result of Black voting. One letter-writer even compared Klan raids to the Boston Tea Party (pp. 37–38). Victims told a different story. Sallie Adkins's husband, a Georgia state senator, was killed by Klansmen in 1869. She begged President Grant for protection and justice, noting that there was no law to punish such crimes (p. 38).
The effects were lasting. Terror helped end federal involvement in Reconstruction and opened a new era of racial repression, because the government could not or would not keep Black Southerners safe (p. 39).
African Americans also worked to shed the marks of slavery. Many dropped names chosen by enslavers and took names like "Freeman" or "Lincoln." Others moved far from old plantations to farm their own land or start businesses. By the end of Reconstruction these goals produced dozens of Black towns. The best known was Mound Bayou, Mississippi, founded in 1887 by Isaiah Montgomery and Ben Green. Black residents owned all of its property, including banks, shops, and farms. Such towns offered freedom from segregation and from sharecropping (p. 39).
In 1859–1860 the South had record cotton crops and more per-person wealth than any other slave economy in the New World. This rested on over four million enslaved people, who were worth about $3 billion to their enslavers. The North, by contrast, had a free-labor market economy of factories, railroads, farms, and banks. It made goods such as New England clothing, McCormick harvesters, and Colt firearms, and railroads carried them across the country. The war revealed the strength of this economy (pp. 39–40).
The Confederacy struggled to pay for the war. The Union blockade stopped cotton sales to Europe, so Congress printed paper money that lost value and caused fast inflation. Officials often skipped cash taxes and simply impressed food and supplies from citizens. Many Southerners went hungry in a farming region (pp. 40–41).
The Union took new steps. Congress created greenbacks, the first fiat currency, in late 1861. It raised tariffs and passed the first national income tax in 1862. In 1863 it created the Comptroller of the Currency to regulate national banking. The North faced inflation too, but never used impressment and successfully paid for the war (p. 41). Greenbacks and national banks replaced hundreds of state bank notes with one federal currency, which sped up trade. The Morrill Land Grant helped found colleges such as the University of Illinois (p. 42).
The Civil War changed how the North and the South made money, and those changes shaped Reconstruction.
The South: poverty and new labor systems. Southern state governments came out of the war deeply in debt. White planters had kept most of their wealth in enslaved people, so emancipation wiped out much of it. Cotton stayed the main crop, but it was now grown and sold differently. After the war, Southern cotton also had to compete with new cotton plantations in other parts of the world. The war and Reconstruction began a stretch of deep poverty in the South that lasted at least until the New Deal of the 1930s. (p. 41)
Sharecropping. Planters broke up large farms into small plots. Each plot was worked by one family, which paid for the right to farm it with a share of the crop. Many Black farmers had no money to buy land, so they turned to this system. It often led to debt that repeated year after year and kept families tied to the land. (pp. 41–42)
Freedom and its limits. Emancipation was the most important result of the war. Black Southerners could now rebuild families, sign contracts, own property, and move freely. But white Southerners worked to keep Black labor bound. They used vagrancy laws to arrest innocent Black men and women. Then they used convict leasing, which could turn one arbitrary arrest into decades of forced, unpaid work. This system lasted until World War II. Violence backed it up. For example, poor whites formed mobs that went "white-capping" to scare off Black job seekers. (pp. 41–42)
The North: government and business grow closer. The North did not boom right after victory. It took until the 1870s to reach its prewar levels of industrial output. Wartime laws still changed the economy:
Not everyone gained. Railroad companies and speculators often blocked the Homestead Act, which was meant to help small farmers settle the West. The close tie between government and business leaders also bred corruption. One example is the market crash of Black Friday, September 24, 1869. The tie also caused a backlash in the West and South against Washington's supposed Eastern, industrial bias. (p. 43)
After the war, the United States put more resources into taking land from Native peoples. (p. 43)
The Navajo Long Walk. The Navajo numbered at least ten thousand and farmed and herded sheep on valuable land. In 1862 General James Carleton picked a dry, nearly treeless site at Bosque Redondo, 300 miles from their homeland. In 1863 he ordered Colonel Kit Carson to round up the Navajo and move them there, and anyone who resisted would be shot. The Long Walk was a series of forced marches from August 1863 to December 1866. Army food was too little and often spoiled, disease spread, and thousands died. General Sherman saw the conditions in 1868. He recommended sending the Navajo home mostly because the reservation cost too much. The Treaty of Bosque Redondo, signed June 1, 1868, let them return. (p. 44)
California. Treaties with California tribes in the 1850s were never ratified by the Senate. The Native population fell from about 150,000 before the Gold Rush to under 20,000 by 1880. State laws let white Californians take Native children and adults as "apprentice" laborers. They only had to bring the person before a judge and promise food and clothing. The "service" could last ten to twenty years. This was effectively slave labor, and it supported mining, farming, railroad, and cattle businesses. (pp. 44–45)
Grant's "peace policy." In 1868 Congress created an Indian Peace Commission, which criticized earlier policy. After Ulysses S. Grant took office, a Board of Indian Commissioners was set up to advise on Native affairs. Much of the reservation system went to Protestant churches, which chose agents and missionaries. Lawmakers hoped religious men would carry out assimilation more fairly. Historian Francis Paul Prucha said it might be better called the "religious policy." (p. 45)
Gender roles. Missionaries tried to replace tribal social units with small patriarchal households. This clashed with Native life, where women did most of the fieldwork and usually controlled what it produced. That gave them standing in their communities. Missionaries wanted women out of the fields and into housework. Most Americans, including agents like J. L. Broaddus in his 1875 report, saw Native people as lazy and their cultures as inferior. (pp. 45–46)
Why Northern support faded. Between 1868 and 1877, and especially after the Panic of 1873, economic questions pushed Reconstruction off the national agenda. Federal troops in key Southern cities were the only thing stopping Democrats from overthrowing Reconstruction. Yet the US never sent enough people to enforce the Fourteenth Amendment. Tired of a decade of conflict, "Stalwart" Republicans turned from civil rights to economics and party politics. They controlled the party by the early 1870s. (p. 46)
Redeemers. New Departure Democrats stressed business, trade, and honest government, and they kept their distance from proslavery Democrats and Copperheads. In the South they were called Redeemers. White Southerners first resisted them. Between 1869 and 1871 they came around, because Redeemers promised local rule by white Democrats. By 1871 Redeemers had overthrown Reconstruction in Tennessee, Virginia, and Georgia. (p. 46)
The Panic of 1873. When Jay Cooke and Company went bankrupt in September 1873, bank runs and closures led to a six-year depression. Northern idealism about Reconstruction faded. In the South, credit disappeared, landowners defaulted, and wages fell. Debt peonage trapped workers in poverty. Democrats won the US House in the 1874 elections, so Congress could no longer direct Reconstruction. (pp. 46–47)
The Mississippi Plan and the 1876 election. In 1875 Mississippi Democrats used violence to frighten Black activists and keep Black people from voting. The Republican governor asked for federal help, and national Republicans ignored him. Meanwhile Rutherford B. Hayes won Ohio's governorship without mentioning Reconstruction. He ran on fighting corruption and restoring the economy. (p. 47)
In 1876 Hayes ran against Democrat Samuel J. Tilden. Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina decided the result amid fraud and violence. A special commission voted 8–7 along party lines for Hayes. Democrats threatened to boycott his inauguration. In the Compromise of 1877, they accepted Hayes in exchange for removing the remaining troops and giving the South economic favors. Hayes took office in March, and the troops left in April. (p. 48)
Results. Southern Democrats no longer feared federal action, so they returned to power. Republicans lacked the will to stop violence or fraud. Some Black officials held local offices in places like South Carolina for a few more years. Most of Reconstruction's promises went unmet. Still, it restored the Union and ended legal slavery. African Americans remained second-class citizens, and women still lacked full public participation. (p. 48)
