The Reconstruction Amendments wrote equal citizenship into the Constitution. Keeping that promise depended on federal will, and on troops, in the South. Through the 1870s both wore away.
Key idea
Violence by the Ku Klux Klan (founded 1865 to 1866) and later groups such as the White League targeted Black voters and Republican officials. Northern fatigue grew, and the Panic of 1873 turned voters' attention to hard times. Democrats retook one Southern state after another. The Compromise of 1877 settled the disputed election of 1876, and federal troops stopped guarding the last Republican statehouses. Sharecropping and segregation laws followed.
Why it works
Congress fought back at first: the Enforcement Acts (1870 and 1871), including the Ku Klux Klan Act, let federal courts and troops act, and after the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, federal marshals arrested more than a thousand suspected Klansmen. But the Supreme Court narrowed the amendments, for example in the Slaughter-House Cases (1873) and in United States v. Cruikshank (1876), which overturned convictions from the 1873 Colfax massacre in Louisiana. As Northern support faded, there were fewer troops, and fewer prosecutions.
Worked example: The disputed election of 1876
Samuel Tilden, a Democrat, won the popular vote and had 184 electoral votes, one short of a majority. Twenty electoral votes, from Florida, Louisiana, South Carolina and Oregon, were disputed. What happened?
- Congress created an Electoral Commission of fifteen: five senators, five representatives and five Supreme Court justices.
- It voted 8 to 7, along party lines, to give all twenty votes to the Republican, Rutherford B. Hayes, for a 185 to 184 win.
- Democrats accepted the result, by most accounts in return for promises that Hayes would withdraw federal troops from Southern statehouses, appoint a Southerner to his Cabinet, and support aid for Southern railroads.
- In April 1877 Hayes withdrew the troops guarding the statehouses in South Carolina and Louisiana, and the Republican governments there fell.
Answer: A commission gave Hayes every disputed vote; the Compromise of 1877 ended federal protection of the last Republican governments.
Common mistake
Many think the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments protected Black Southerners from 1870 on. After 1877 they were widely ignored in practice for decades: poll taxes, literacy tests and violence kept most Black Southerners from voting, and segregation laws spread, until the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. The amendments stayed in the Constitution, and that movement used them. Check: a right on paper is not the same as a right enforced.
Historians long described Reconstruction as a failure caused by corrupt Southern Republican governments. Since the mid-1900s most historians, drawing on records the earlier writers ignored, have stressed its achievements (the amendments, public schools, Black political participation) and see violence and the withdrawal of federal support as the main reasons it ended. Debate continues about how much more the federal government could have done.