The Reconstruction Era Part 4

Reconstruction Ends

HOW DID DEMOCRATS RAGAIN CONTROL OF SOUTHERN GOVERNMENTS?
• As a general, Ulysses S. Grant had led the North to victory in the Civil War.

• His reputation as a war hero carried him into the White House in the election of

1868 and to reelection in 1872.

• Unfortunately, Grant had little experience in politics.

• Scandal and corruption plagued Grant’s presidency.

• In addition, a severe economic depression began during his second term.

• A crisis arose when a powerful banking firm declared bankruptcy.

• This triggered a wave of fear known as the Panic of 1873.

• It set off a depression that lasted much of the decade.

• The depression and the scandals in the Grant administration hurt the

Republican Party.
• In the 1874 congressional elections, the Democrats won back control of the

House of Representatives and made gains in the Senate.

• These changes cost the Radical Republicans much of their power.

Reconstruction Ends

• Meanwhile, Southern Democrats worked hard to regain control of their

state governments.
• They got help from groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, which terrorized African

Americans and other Republican voters.

• The Democrats who came to power in the South called themselves “redeemers”.

• They claimed to have redeemed, or saved, their state from “black Republican” rule.

• The Election of 1876

• Republicans attempted to keep control of the White House by choosing Ohio

Governor Rutherford B. Hayes as their candidate for president in 1876.

• Hayes held moderate views on Reconstruction.

• Republicans hoped he would appeal to voters in both the North and South.

• Hayes ran against Democrat Samuel Tilden, the governor of New York, in a very

close election.

• Neither got a majority of the electoral votes, mainly because of confusing election

returns from three Southern states.

Reconstruction Ends

• The Election of 1876 cont.

• These states (Florida, South Carolina, and Louisiana) were still under

Republican rule.

• Republicans insisted that many voters in these states favored Hayes, but their votes

had not been counted.

• Congress named a commission, which is a group of officials chosen for a specific

responsibility, to decide who should receive the disputed electoral votes.
• The commission recommended giving them all to Hayes, which would make Hayes president

by one electoral vote.

• To ensure the Congress accepted this outcome, Republicans made many

promises to the Democrats.

• One of these was a pledge to withdraw the troops who had been stationed in the

South since the end of the Civil War.
• Shortly after Hayes took office in 1877, the last troops left the South.

• Rise of the “New South”

• By the 1880s, forward-looking Southerners were convinced that their region

must develop an industrial economy.

Reconstruction Ends

• Rise of the “New South” cont.

• They argued that the South had lost the Civil War because its industry did not

match the North’s.

• Atlanta newspaper editor Henry Grady headed a group that urged the Southerners

to “out-Yankee the Yankees” and build a “New South”.
• This “New South” would have industries based on the region’s coal, iron, tobacco, cotton,

and lumber resources.

• Southern industry made great gains in the 1880s.

• Textile mills sprang up across the region.

• The American Tobacco Company, developed largely by James Duke of North Carolina, came

to control nearly all of tobacco manufacturing in the country.

• By 1890, the South produced nearly 20 percent of the nation’s iron and steel.

• Much of the industry was in Alabama, near deposits of iron ore.
• In Florida, port cities Jacksonville and Pensacola prospered because of strong demand for

lumber and other products.

• The South possessed a cheap and reliable supply of labor.

• A railroad-building boom also helped development.

• By 1870, the railroad system, destroyed by the war, was nearly rebuilt.
• Between 1880 and 1890, track mileage more than doubled.

Reconstruction Ends

• The New South’s Rural Economy

• In spite of these gains, the South did not develop an industrial economy as

strong as the North’s.

• Agriculture remained the South’smain economic activity.

• Supporters of the New South hoped to promote small, profitable farms that

grew a variety of crops instead of relying on cotton.

• A different economy emerged, however.

• Many landowners held on to their large estates.
• When estates were divided, much of the land went to sharecropping and tenant farming.

•Neither of these activities was profitable.

• Debt also caused problems.

• Poor farmers used credit to buy supplies.
• Merchants who provided credit also charged high prices, and farmers’ debt rose.

• Higher cotton production drove cotton prices down.
• Lower prices led farmers to plant even more cotton.

• The growth of sharecropping and the heavy reliance on a single cash crop helped

prevent improvements in the conditions of Southern farmers.

A Divided Society

WHY DID FREEDOM FOR AFRICAN AMERICANS BECOME A DISTANT DREAM
AFTER RECONSTRUCTION ENDED?
• As Reconstruction ended, African Americans’ dreams for justice faded.

• Laws passed by the redeemer governments denied Southern African Americans

many of their newly won rights.

• Voting Restrictions

• The Fifteenth Amendment barred a state from denying someone the right to

vote because of race.

• White Southern leaders found ways to get around the amendment.

• One way was by requiring a poll tax, which is a tax a person must pay in order to vote.
• Many African Americans could not afford to pay the tax, so they could not vote.

• Another means of denying voting rights was the literacy test, which is a method

to prevent African Americans from voting by requiring prospective voters to
read and write at a specific level.

A Divided Society

• Voting Restrictions cont.

• Because most Southern African Americans had little education, literacy tests

prevented many from voting.

• Both poll taxes and literacy tests also kept some whites from voting.

• To prevent this, some states passed grandfather clauses, which allowed people to

vote if their fathers or grandfathers had voted before Reconstruction.
• Because African Americans could not vote until 1867, they were excluded.
• Such laws and the constant threat of violence caused African American voting to decline.

• Jim Crow Laws

• By the late 1800s, segregation had also become common across the South.

• Segregation, which is the separation or isolation of a race, class, or group.

• Southern states passed the so-called Jim Crow Laws that required African

Americans and whites to be separated in almost every public place.

• In 1896 the Supreme Court upheld the Plessy v. Ferguson.

• The case involved a Louisiana law that required separate sections on trains for African

Americans and whites.

• The Court ruled that segregation was legal as long as African Americans had access to public

places equal to those as the whites.

A Divided Society

• Jim Crow Laws cont.

• In practice, the separate facilities for African Americans were far from equal.

• Southern states spent much more money on schools and other facilities for whites

than on those for African Americans.
• Still, this “separate but equal” doctrine gave legal support to segregation for more than 50

years.

• Violence against African Americans also rose.

• One form was lynching, which means putting to death by the illegal action of a mob.

• This occurred by hanging someone.

• Some African Americans were lunched because they were suspected of crimes,

others for not being “white” enough.

• Exodusters and Buffalo Soldiers

• Formerly enslaved people began to leave the South during Reconstruction.

• They called themselves “Exodusters”, which is a name that came from the biblical

book of Exodus that describes the Jews’ escape from slavery in Egypt.

A Divided Society

• Exodusters and Buffalo Soldiers cont.

• During the exodus of the 1870s, more than 20,000 African Americans migrated

to Kansas.

• They hoped their journey would take them far from poverty that they experienced in

the South.

• Other African Americans escaped the South by becoming soldiers.

• They served in segregated army units and fought in the western Indian Wars from

1867 until 1896.
• According to legend, the men were called “buffalo soldiers” by the Apache and Cheyenne.

• The soldiers adopted the name as a sign of honor and respect.

• Units of Buffalo Soldiers answered the nation’s call to arms not only in the West, but also in

Cuba, the Philippines, Hawaii, and Mexico.

• Reconstruction’s Impact

• Reconstruction was a success in some ways and a failure in others.

• It helped the South rebuild its economy, however, much of the it remained

agricultural and economically poor.

A Divided Society

• Reconstruction’s Impact cont.

• African Americans gained a greater equality and shared power in government,

but their advances did not last.

• In the words of the great African American writer and civil rights leader W.E.B. Du

Bois, “The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back
again toward slavery.”

• Yet the seeds of freedom and equality had been planted, they continued to

struggle to gain their full rights.