5.11 Failure of Reconstruction

Most freedpeople wanted land, but there was no large-scale land redistribution. Planters had land but little cash; freedpeople had labor but no land. Sharecropping emerged as the result. A landowner provided land, a cabin, tools and seed, and in return the sharecropper family gave the owner a share of the crop, often half.

Sharecroppers usually had to buy food and supplies on credit from local merchants under the crop-lien system, in which the merchant took a claim on the future crop. With high interest and falling cotton prices, many families ended each year owing more than they had earned and were legally bound to stay. Sharecropping gave Black families more control over their daily work than gang labor under slavery, but it trapped many white and Black Southerners in poverty for generations.

The Ku Klux Klan, founded in Tennessee in 1865–1866 by Confederate veterans, used whippings, arson and murder to intimidate Black voters, officeholders, teachers and their white Republican allies. Congress passed the Enforcement Acts (1870–1871), including the Ku Klux Klan Act, and President Grant used federal troops and prosecutions to break the Klan in parts of the South.

But other groups, such as the White League in Louisiana and the Red Shirts in South Carolina, carried on the violence more openly. In the Colfax Massacre in Louisiana (1873), a white militia killed dozens of Black men, many after they surrendered. In United States v. Cruikshank (1876), which arose from Colfax, the Supreme Court ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment restricted states, not private individuals, making it much harder for the federal government to prosecute such violence. In the Slaughterhouse Cases (1873), the Court had already read the amendment's protections narrowly.

As federal support faded, white Democrats calling themselves Redeemers took back Southern state governments one by one, often through fraud and violence. By 1876 Republicans held power only in South Carolina, Louisiana and Florida.

• Economic depression: the Panic of 1873 turned Northern attention to jobs and money.
• Scandal: corruption in Grant's administration, such as the Whiskey Ring, made many voters cynical about federal power.
• Racism and fatigue: many white Northerners had never supported racial equality and grew tired of the 'Southern question'.
• Politics: Democrats won control of the House in 1874, and the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which banned discrimination in public accommodations, was rarely enforced and was struck down in 1883.

In 1876 Democrat Samuel Tilden won the popular vote but was one electoral vote short of a majority. Republican Rutherford B. Hayes needed all 20 disputed electoral votes, from Florida, Louisiana, South Carolina and one from Oregon. A special electoral commission voted 8–7 along party lines to give them all to Hayes.

In the informal Compromise of 1877, Southern Democrats accepted Hayes as president. In return, Hayes withdrew federal troops from the statehouses of South Carolina and Louisiana, ending federal support for the last Republican governments in the South, and promised support for Southern economic development. Reconstruction was over.

Historians' views have changed sharply. In the early 1900s the 'Dunning School' portrayed Reconstruction as a corrupt disaster forced on the South, a view that helped justify Jim Crow. W. E. B. Du Bois challenged it in Black Reconstruction in America (1935), and since the 1960s most historians, such as Eric Foner, have described Reconstruction as an unfinished revolution: a real, if brief, experiment in interracial democracy that was defeated by violence and Northern retreat.

Its lasting achievements were the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, Black churches, schools and colleges, and the example of Black political participation. Civil rights activists in the 1950s and 1960s used those amendments in what some called a 'Second Reconstruction'.