IV.

The End of Reconstruction

The process of overthrowing Reconstruction governments varied. Everywhere, however, Reconstruction's opponents called for white racial unity and denounced scalawags as traitors to their race and region, and appealed to these scalawags to come home to the “white man's party.” In states with substantial white majorities, mainly those in the upper South, convincing most whites to vote Democratic was enough to defeat Reconstruction, a process that white Southerners called redemption. By 1871 Republican governments had yielded to conservative Democratic rule in the upper South states of Tennessee, North Carolina, and Virginia, as well as in Georgia, where Republican mismanagement undercut what should have been a more promising political environment for Republicans, given the large black population.

In the lower South, however, even the defection of virtually all scalawags was not enough to ensure Republican defeat; there, conservatives could win only by convincing some blacks either to vote Democratic or to stay home on election day. In those states black voters were subjected to an unprecedented level of fraud, intimidation, and violence. Terrorist organizations—the Ku Klux Klan, which was formally suppressed in 1871, and other Klan-like bodies that emerged—played a major role in this campaign. Most blacks continued to vote Republican, but in states where blacks formed about half the population, the loss of even a small fraction of black voters, combined with fraud at the ballot box, could be decisive. Throughout the lower South, Democrats returned to power in the mid-1870s. In the last three states to be redeemed, South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana, Reconstruction ended as part of an apparent political compromise. Both Democrats and Republicans claimed victory in those states in the elections of 1876, but leaders of the national Republican Party agreed to recognize Democratic claims to state offices after receiving the electoral votes of those states for Republican presidential candidate Rutherford B. Hayes, who thereby won the election.

As Republicans had feared, Democratic victory in the South led to a massive scaling back of Reconstruction's accomplishments. Taxes were slashed; so too was spending on education, especially for black schools. Throughout the South, a campaign ensued to put blacks in “their place,” which culminated around the turn of the century when one state after another passed laws providing for the rigid segregation of the races and for the disfranchisement of blacks through such devices as literacy tests, poll taxes, and political primaries that were open only to whites. These devices prevented almost all Southern blacks and some poor whites from voting or choosing candidates. During the first half of the 20th century, the South became a rigidly segregated society dominated by an all-white Democratic Party.

The Reconstruction effort to transform the South and turn freed people into citizens, although not entirely successful, was remarkable for its time. Even an unequal freedom was very different from slavery; the free-labor South that emerged in the late 19th century was not the South that blacks wanted, but it was not the South that their former masters wanted either. Despite its overthrow, Reconstruction left an important legacy: commitment to a republican society based on equality under the law, as exemplified in the Reconstruction-era legislation that remained on the books even when unenforced. A century later, during the civil rights movement, Americans, both black and white, would build on that legacy, as they renewed their struggle for equality.