Lesson 3: Restoring Southern Power

Lesson Focus

Reconstruction's end brought a mixed legacy. While the Southern economy began rebuilding, political power was restored to former Confederates, systematically denying civil rights to African Americans and creating a "New South" with old inequalities.

People to Know

Rutherford B. Hayes, Samuel J. Tilden

Learning Objectives

• Describe Southern resistance to Reconstruction, including secret societies and political tactics that helped Democrats regain control.
• Discuss political and economic changes in the post-Reconstruction South, including segregation and early industrialization.

Frustrated by Radical Reconstruction, many white Southerners organized secret societies to resist federal authority and restore their power.
Starting in 1866, the Ku Klux Klan used terror and violence to threaten carpetbaggers, teachers, and especially black voters.
This campaign of intimidation successfully weakened the Republican party in the South, allowing white Democrats, known as “Redeemers,” to begin regaining control of state governments throughout the former Confederacy, setting the stage for Reconstruction's end.

The highly disputed presidential election of 1876 created a constitutional crisis, as both parties claimed victory in three Southern states.
A special commission awarded all disputed votes to the Republican candidate, Rutherford B. Hayes, enraging Democrats.
To avoid another conflict, leaders negotiated the Compromise of 1877. Pay special attention to this: Democrats accepted Hayes’s victory in exchange for the complete withdrawal of federal troops from the South, officially ending Reconstruction.

With federal troops gone after 1877, white Southern Democrats quickly consolidated power and began to strip away the rights of African Americans.
They passed a series of “Jim Crow laws” that legally mandated segregation, or the separation of races, in schools, transportation, and public places.
Despite black protests and the earlier Civil Rights Act of 1875, the Supreme Court's ruling against it in 1883 cemented a system of racial inequality that would last for decades.

Following Reconstruction, Southern leaders promoted a vision for a “New South” by partnering with Northern financiers to rebuild the region’s economy.
This alliance brought capital to build thousands of miles of new railroads and develop industries like steel, tobacco processing, and cotton mills.
This industrialization helped the Southern economy recover and created the “Solid South,” a century-long Democratic voting bloc, but it relied on paying very low wages to its workers.

Reconstruction ultimately failed to secure long-term economic independence or political rights for black Americans, as federal protection was temporary.
Without land or education, many freed people were trapped in systems of sharecropping, which resembled a new form of slavery.
Note that its most enduring success was constitutional: the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments established the principle of equality and citizenship, providing the legal foundation for future civil rights movements in the 1900s.