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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