Achievements of Reconstruction

Achievements of Reconstruction-Era State Governments

  • civil rights laws and judicial reform
  • public school in all southern states
  • other public institutions:
    • asylums
    • hospitals
    • orphanages
    • prisons
  • infrastructure and economic development projects

Ordinary Black Southerners and Reconstruction

  • most efforts at land redistribution, economic equality fell short
  • cotton industry revived post-war
  • labor systems renegotiated, most commonly as sharecropping
    • families farmed parcels of larger estates
    • received a share of profits from the crop sale
    • often led to dependency and debt to their landlords
  • a range of outcomes for black southerners
  • economic gains disappointed most

End of Reconstruction

  • southern whites pushed back at every step
  • panic of 1837 → economic depression, labor conflict
    • undercut northern support for Reconstruction
    • many white Republicans backed away from supporting racial equality
  • new group of white southern democrats “redeemers” gained power
    • won the House of Representatives, 1874
    • control of state governments, mid-late 1870s
  • 1876 presidential election was close and contested
    • Rutherford Hayes (R) vs Samuel Tilden (D)
    • Hayes lost the popular vote by 250,000
    • won the electoral college by 1 vote
  • fears of a new sectional crisis
  • compromise of 1877
    • Hayes becomes President
    • federal troops withdraw from the South
    • special economic favors to the South

“Undoing” Reconstruction in South

  • post 1877, white southerners suppressed black civil rights
    • 1890-1910, new or amended state constitutions disenfranchised black people
    • legally colorblind measures: poll taxes, literacy tests, etc.
    • “Jim Crow” laws segregated and denied black civil rights
    • Klan-style terrorist violence and lynching
  • legal discrimination remained until the mid-20th century

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