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