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