Students will examine the impact of the Compromise of 1877 and the removal of federal troops from the former Confederacy. Maps to Key Concepts 2, 8, & 10
What else should my students know?
21.A The Compromise of 1877 emerged from the contested presidential election of 1876. Republican Rutherford B. Hayes was given the presidency in exchange for the formal end of Reconstruction, including the removal of the last federal troops from the South.
21.B After the end of Reconstruction, the Ku Klux Klan and local and state governments attacked African American political participation, leading to the return of white Democratic rule in the former Confederacy.
21.C White Democratic governments across the South used Jim Crow legal codes to enforce new ways of controlling black labor and black bodies.
21D. A sustained campaign of racial terrorism, including public lynchings of thousands of African Americans, enforced white supremacy after slavery itself was ended.
How can I teach this?
- During the Jim Crow era, Southern states used peonage and convict labor to force African Americans to work without pay for years and even decades. The PBS documentary Slavery by Another Name covers this period well.
- States imposed literacy tests and the grandfather clause, which were designed to disqualify African Americans from voting. Literacy tests were unfairly administered to the black population. The grandfather clause, which obviously targeted African Americans, provided exemptions from these tests and from poll taxes only for voters—or descendants of voters up to grandchildren—who had voted prior to 1867.
- From producers Hannah Ayers and Lance Warren, An Outrage is a short documentary on lynching in the American South. The film and the accompanying viewer’s guide teach about the rise of white Democratic rule in the post-Reconstruction era and how African Americans resisted racial terror, in part by joining The Great Migration.
- The digital project A Red Record documents histories of lynching throughout the former Confederacy, demonstrating the connection between lynchings and white supremacy after the Civil War.
- Many hundreds of Indigenous and Latinx people were lynched throughout the West. The history is still being uncovered, but several online resources provide an introduction. The work of Ken Gonzales-Day in his Erased Lynchings project illuminates some of this history.
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Nonetheless, Reconstruction soon began to wane. During the 1870s, many Republicans retreated from both the racial egalitarianism and the broad definition of federal power spawned by the Civil War. Southern corruption and instability, Reconstruction’s critics argued, stemmed from the exclusion of the region’s “best men”—the planters—from power. As Northern Republicans became more conservative, Reconstruction came to symbolize a misguided attempt to uplift the lower classes of society. Reflecting the shifting mood, a series of Supreme Court decisions, beginning with the Slaughterhouse Cases in 1873, severely limited the scope of Reconstruction laws and constitutional amendments.
By 1876 only South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana remained under Republican control. The outcome of that year’s presidential contest between Republican Rutherford B. Hayes and Democrat Samuel J. Tilden hinged on disputed returns from these states. Negotiations between Southern political leaders and representatives of Hayes produced a bargain: Hayes would recognize Democratic control of the remaining Southern states, and Democrats would not block the certification of his election by Congress (see United States presidential election of 1876). Hayes was inaugurated; federal troops returned to their barracks; and as an era when the federal government accepted the responsibility for protecting the rights of the former slaves, Reconstruction came to an end.
By the turn of the century, a new racial system had been put in place in the South, resting on the disenfranchisement of Black voters, a rigid system of racial segregation, the relegation of African Americans to low-wage agricultural and domestic employment, and legal and extralegal violence to punish those who challenged the new order. Nonetheless, while flagrantly violated, the Reconstruction amendments remained in the Constitution, sleeping giants, as Charles Sumner called them, to be awakened by subsequent generations who sought to redeem the promise of genuine freedom for the descendants of slavery. Not until the 1960s, in the civil rights movement, sometimes called the “second Reconstruction,” would the country again attempt to fulfill the political and social agenda of Reconstruction.
Eric Foner