Historians usually identify 1877, the year when the last federal troops left the South, as the official end of Reconstruction. However, interest in Reconstruction, especially concern for and a commitment to black freedom, began to wane for most Northerners even before the mid-1870s. Journalist Nicholas Lemann states correctly that even though the Reconstruction Acts of 1867 had made ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment a precondition for readmission to the Union, “it required the presence of the U.S. Army in the South to give the Fourteenth Amendment the force of law. As soon as the federal government stopped using troops as enforcers, in the mid-eighteen-seventies, the Southern states ignored the Fourteenth Amendment, and continued to do so for nearly a century.”36

In May 1872, Congress passed the General Amnesty Act, removing political disabilities imposed by section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment. A month later, it abolished the Freedmen’s Bureau. In July 1874, the Freedman’s Savings Bank, established to provide the freedpeople with basic banking facilities and to promote saving money, shut its doors. The Panic of 1873 and local concerns, not the rights of African-American Southerners, preoccupied most Northerners. To a significant degree, by the early 1870s, Americans had lost interest in Reconstruction. They tried to put the Civil War behind them and look forward.

The burning embers of sectionalism and race hatred, however, remained dimly lit during Reconstruction. Racial violence ran through the Reconstruction era like a leitmotif, peaking during the 1870s when race riots at Meridian, Mississippi (1871), Colfax, Louisiana (1873), Vicksburg, Mississippi (1874), New Orleans and Coushatta, Louisiana (1874), Yazoo City and Clinton, Mississippi (1875), and Hamburg and Ellenton, South Carolina (1876), marred the Southern landscape. The Enforcement Acts had proven insufficient to protect the freedpeople from whites determined to retain racial control over them.

For years Radical Republican senator Charles Sumner had attempted to push through Congress a federal statute protecting the civil rights of blacks, specifically the granting of equal access to public facilities to persons of all races. Following Sumner’s death in March 1874, his bill found champions in Senator Frederick T. Frelinghuysen of New Jersey and Massachusetts representative Benjamin F. Butler. The Civil Rights Act of 1875 finally came to pass in February of that year. This last major piece of Reconstruction era legislation aimed to protect the freedpeople in public venues. It mandated nondiscriminatory accommodations in inns, public conveyances, and theaters, prohibited jury discrimination based on race, and declared all racial discrimination cases the purview of the federal courts. The bill was one of the most controversial Congressional bills of its day because, its critics asserted, it legislated social equality. After less than a decade, in 1883, the U.S. Supreme Court declared the equal-accommodations sections of the 1875 Civil Rights Act unconstitutional. In its decision in the Civil Rights Cases (1883), the court held that the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments regulated state, not private, actions and further denied that discrimination in public settings stemmed from slavery. Congress, the court insisted, held power to correct instances of state discrimination after they had occurred, but had no mandate to prevent such actions from occurring. In his famous lone dissent, Justice John Marshall Harlan (1833–1911) argued that the freedpeople continued to suffer from the “badges of slavery and servitude” and that Congress had fashioned the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments to eradicate discrimination in private and public contexts.

With all branches of the federal government increasingly uninterested in the plight of the freedpeople, white Southerners in the 1870s and afterward looked for ways to construct an economic modus operandi with Northern capitalists, all the while retaining racial control at home. Though blacks acquired capital, formed communities, continued to vote, and held seats in state and local governments until late in the century, whites contrived to fashion new forms of controlling them.37 These included, according to Foner, “exclusion from juries, severe punishment for trifling crimes, the continued apprenticeship of their children against parental wishes, and a general inability to obtain justice.”38 In spite of the Fifteenth Amendment, white Southerners found ways to discourage blacks from voting by implementing residency requirements, discriminatory poll taxes, literacy tests, and so-called Grandfather clauses. When these tactics fell short, whites employed brute force.

The economic collapse of 1873, the loss of Republican interest in and support for remaking the South, the continued racial violence in the South, the systematic overthrow of Radical governments in the South after 1869, and the landslide victory of Democrats in the 1874 Congressional elections (“the greatest reversal of partisan alignments in the entire nineteenth century,” Foner writes) marked the beginning of the end for America’s Reconstruction experiment.39 By the summer of 1876, only three states—Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina—remained under Radical control. The results of the controversial presidential election of 1876 signaled Reconstruction’s end.

That famous campaign, pitting the Ohio Republican Rutherford B. Hayes against the New York Democrat Samuel J. Tilden, ended inconclusively with Hayes twenty electoral votes shy of the 185 necessary for election and election returns in four states contested between the two parties. To resolve the dilemma, Congress appointed a bipartisan Electoral Commission that declared Hayes the victor. An informal arrangement between Southern Democrats and Hayes’s supporters resolved the deadlock. The so-called Compromise of 1877 smoothed the way for Hayes to assume the presidency in exchange for economic and political concessions to the South, including the removal of the remaining federal troops from the region, the appointment of a Southerner to Hayes’s cabinet, and the general awarding of “Home Rule” to the former Confederate states. White Southerners’ much-anticipated period of “Redemption” had arrived. Reconstruction was over, a circumstance, according to historian Steven Hahn, that “ushered in a new era of state-organized violence in defense of private property and respectable property holders at all levels of government.”40

Unquestionably, Reconstruction marked one of the great turning points in American history. “Never as radical as has been charged,” explains historian Hans L. Trefousse, “it nevertheless represented a real effort to enforce equal rights by federal legislation.”41 Over a century ago, another historian, William Garrott Brown, wrote that the withdrawal of federal troops from the South in 1877 occasioned “a turning of the current of affairs into a new channel, as clearly marked as any to be found in our history since the revolution.” Whereas General Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox had signified the Confederacy’s death and slavery’s end, in 1877 the nation “reached the end of the entire prior period during which American political history was mainly an affair of North and South.”42 As Trefousse observed, Reconstruction’s demise also signaled a shift from the diminution of power of the Executive branch in the years following Lincoln’s assassination to the assertion of the power of the presidency in the early twentieth century.43

The saga of Reconstruction included many causes won and lost. Had Lincoln’s quest for “a just, and a lasting peace” been attained? Absolutely not. The South’s post-1870s “Redemption” by so-called Bourbon Democrats led to the era of Jim Crow, what Hahn terms “a post-emancipation regime of domination and subordination.”44 Recently historian Stephen Kantrowitz observed that among Reconstruction’s “most important political developments were the virtual revolution in Southern life, the consolidation of national citizenship, and the forces that arose to limit those projects.”45 To be sure, by 1877, the nation had reunited, but serious questions pertaining to free labor, civil and states’ rights, and racial inequality remained unanswered. These became Reconstruction’s complex legacy. Issues of liberty and equal rights continued to plague the U.S. until the Second Reconstruction of the 1960s.