Sara Ting P.

7
January 6, 2011

Chapter 12 Section 3
The Collapse of Reconstruction
** Southern opposition to Radical Reconstruction, along with economic problems in the North, ended Reconstruction.

I. Opposition to Reconstruction
-White Southerners who took direct action against African-American participation in government were in the
minority.
A. Ku Klux Klan
-Founded as a social club for Confederate veterans, the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) started in Tennessee in
1866.
-Membership spread rapidly through the South and there were many violent terrorist organizations. By
1868, the Klan existed in nearly every Southern state.
-The KKK’s goal was to restore white supremacy. Its method was to prevent African Americans from
exercising their political rights.
-Between 1868-1871, the Klan and other secret groups killed thousands of men, women, and children,
and burned schools, churches, and property.
-Whites who tried to help African Americans—whether by educating them, renting land to them, or
buying their cops—were also in danger of the KKK.
-Another goal of the KKK was to turn the Republicans, who had established the Reconstruction
governments, out of power. John Stephens, a white Republican, was assassinated in 1870.
-While Klan members tried to conceal their identities when they struck, Southern Democrats openly used
violence to intimidate Republicans before the 1875 state election in Mississippi.
-Democrats rioted and attacked Republican leaders and prominent African Americans.
-Their terrorist campaign frightened the African-American majority away from the polls, and white
Democratic candidates swept the election. The Democrats used similar tactics to win the 1876 elections in
Florida, South Carolina, and Louisiana.
B. Economic Pressure
-The Klan and other secret groups tried to prevent African Americans from making economic, political
progress. African Americans who worked in occupations other than agriculture were subject to attacks.
-Economic necessity forced former slaves (who had little money or training in other occupations) to work
for whites as wage laborers or sharecroppers.
-Some white Southerners refused to hire or do business with African Americans who were revealed by
election officials to have voted Republican.
-The fear of economic reprisals kept many former slaves from voting at all.
C. Legislative Response
-To curtail Klan violence and Democratic intimidation, Congress passed a series of Enforcement Acts in
1870 and 1871. One act provided for the federal supervision of elections in Southern states. Another act
gave the president the power to use federal troops in areas where the Klan was active.
-President Grant was not aggressive in his use of the power given to him by the Enforcement Acts, and in
1882, the Supreme Court ruled that the 1871 Enforcement Act was unconstitutional.
-Although federal enforcement of anti-Klan legislation was limited, it did contribute to a decrease in the
Klan’s activities in the late 1870s.
-The reason for the reduction in Klan violence was the Klan’s own success—by 1880, terrorist groups had
managed to restore white supremacy throughout the South. Therefore, the Klan no longer needed such
organized activity to limit the political and civil rights of most African Americans.
D. Shifts in Political Power
-By passing the Enforcement Acts, Congress seemed to shore up Republican power.
-Shortly after these acts went into effect, Congress passed legislation that severely weakened the
Republican Party in the South.
-With the Amnesty Act, passed in May 1872, Congress returned the right to vote and the right to hold
federal and state offices—revoked by the Fourteenth Amendment—to about 150,000 former
Confederates, who would almost certainly vote Democratic.
II. Scandals and Money Crisis Hurt Republicans
-As Southern Republicans struggled to maintain their hold on Reconstruction governments, widespread political
corruption in the federal government weakened their party.
-During the early 1870s, scandals plagued the Grant administration. These scandals diverted public attention away
from conditions in the South.
A. Fraud and Bribery
-President Grant was considered an honest man.
-He often selected friends and acquaintances rather than people of proven ability. Too frequently, Grant’s
appointees turned out to be dishonest.
-Beginning in 1872, a series of long-simmering scandals associated with Grant’s administration boiled
over.
-First, a newspaper exposed how the Credit Mobilier, a construction company working for the Union
Pacific Railroad, had skimmed off large profits from the railroad’s government contract.
-Several top Republicans, including Vice-President Schuyler Colfax, were involved.
B. Republican Unity Shattered
-A group of Republicans, angered by the corruption, called for honest, efficient government.
-They formed the Liberal Republican Party in 1872, hoping to oust Grant in that year’s presidential
election.
-As the 1872 presidential election approached, the Liberal Republicans held a separate convention. They
chose Horace Greeley, vocal pre-Civil War abolitionist, as their candidate.
-Horace Greeley had supported some Radical Republican causes—abolition, the 14 th and 15th
amendments. However, he had broken with Radicals by calling for universal amnesty for Confederates
and for an end to military rule in the South.
-He wanted former slaves to fend for themselves.
-The Democrats also nominated Greeley. Greeley lost the 1872 presidential election to Grant by a wide
margin.
-Although the Liberal Republicans did not win the White House, they did weaken the Radicals’ hold over
the Republican Party. This made it harder for Radicals to continue to impose their Reconstruction plan on
the South.
C. Continued Scandal
-In 1875, the so-called Whiskey Ring was exposed. Internal-revenue collectors and other officials
accepted bribes from whiskey distillers who wanted to avoid paying taxes on their product. One of the
238 persons indicted in this scandal was Grant’s private secretary, General Orville E. Babcock. Grant
refused to believe that he was betrayed by such a close associate.
-In 1876, an investigation revealed that Secretary of War William W. Belknap had accepted bribes from
merchants who wanted to keep their profitable trading concessions in Indian territory. The House of
Representatives impeached Belknap, who promptly resigned.
-The public also learned that the secretary of the navy had taken bribes from shipbuilders and the
secretary of the interior had had shady dealings with land speculators.
-Overall, there were a bunch of corruption and scandals in the Grant administration, and Grant did not
seek reelection in 1876.
III. Economic Turmoil
-As if political scandals were not enough for the country to deal with, a wave of economic troubles hit the nation
in 1873.
A. The Panic of 1873
-The economy had been expanding since the end of the Civil War, and investors became convinced that
business profits would continue to increase indefinitely.
-Eager to take advantage of new business opportunities in the South, Northern and Southern investors
borrowed increasing amounts of money and built new facilities as quickly as possible.
-Many who invested in these new businesses took on more debt than they could afford.
-A Philadelphia banker named Jay Cooke invested heavily on railroads. Not enough investors bought
shares in Cooke’s railroad lines to cover his ballooning construction costs, and he could not pay his debts.
In September 1873, Cooke’s banking firm, the nation’s largest dealer in government securities, went
bankrupt, setting off a series of financial failures known as the panic of 1873.
-Smaller banks closed, and the stock market temporarily collapsed.
-Within a year, 89 railroads went broke. By 1875, more than 18,000 companies had folded.
 -The panic triggered a five-year economic depression—a period of reduced business activity and high
unemployment—in which 3 million workers lost their jobs.
B. Currency Dispute
-The economic depression following the panic of 1873 also fueled a dispute over currency.
-This dispute had its roots in the Civil War. During the war, the federal government had begun to issue
greenbacks, paper money that was not backed by equal value in gold. When the war ended, many
financial experts advocated withdrawing the greenbacks and returning the nation completely to a currency
backed by gold. This action would have reduced the number of dollars in circulation.
-Southern and Western farmers and manufacturers wanted the government to issue more greenbacks.
They believed that “easy money” – a large money supply—would help them pay off their debts.
-In 1875, Congress passed the Specie Resumption Act, which promised to put the country back on the
gold standard. This act sparked further debate over monetary policies.
-As the economy improved, beginning in 1878, the controversy died down.
-This debate over money was one of the factors that drew the attention away from Reconstruction
IV. Judicial and Popular Support Fades
-Radical Republicans weaken from political scandals, economic problems, and the restoration of political rights to
former Confederate Democrats.
-The Supreme Court began to undo some of the social and political changes that the Radicals had made.
A. Supreme Court Decisions
-Although Congress had passed important laws to protect the political and civil rights of African
Americans, the Supreme Court began to take away those same protections.
-During the 1870s, the Court issued a series of decisions that undermined both the Fourteenth and
Fifteenth Amendments.
-The Court contended that most of the Americans’ basic civil rights were obtained through their
citizenship in a state and that the amendment did not protect those rights.
-Another setback for Reconstruction was US vs. Cruikshank in 1876, in which the Court ruled that the
Fourteenth Amendment did not give the federal government the right to punish individual whites who
oppressed blacks.
-In the same year, the US. vs. Reese, the Court ruled in favor of officials who had barred African
Americans from voting, stating that the Fifteenth Amendment did not “confer the right of suffrage on
anyone” but merely listed grounds on which states could not deny suffrage.
-The Supreme Court’s restrictive rulings had narrowed the scope of these amendments so much that the
federal government no longer had much power to protect the rights of African Americans.
B. Northern Support Fades
-As the Supreme Court rejected Reconstruction policies in the 1870s, Northern voters grew indifferent to
events in the South.
-Weary of the “Negro question” and sick of “carpetbag government,” many Northern voters shifted their
attention to such national concerns as the panic of 1873 and the corruption in Grant’s administration.
-A desire for reconciliation between the regions spread through the North. Although political violence
continued in the South and African Americans were denied civil and political rights, the tide of public
opinion in the North began to turn against Reconstruction policies.
-As both judicial and public support decreased, Republicans began to back away from their commitment
to Reconstruction.
-The Radicals, Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens, were dead.
-Business interests diverted the attention of both moderates and Radicals, and Scalawags and
carpetbaggers deserted the Republican Party.
-Republicans gradually came to believe that government could not impose the moral and social changes
needed for former slaves to make progress in the South. As a result, Republicans slowly retreated from
the policies of Reconstruction.
V. Democrats “Redeem” the South
-Between 1869 and 1875, Democrats recaptured the state governments of Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia,
Mississippi, North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia.
-As a result of redemption—as the Democrats called their return to power in the South—and the national election
of 1876, congressional Reconstruction came to an end.
A. Election of 1876
-In 1876, Grant decided not to run for a third term.
 -The Republicans then chose the governor of Ohio, Rutherford B. Hayes, as their candidate.
-The Democrats chose their ablest leader, Governor Samuel J. Tilden of New York.
-Tilden won the popular vote. However, he fell one short of the number of electoral votes needed to win.
-Then, Congress appointed a commission to deal with the problem. The commission, which had a
Republican majority, gave the election to the Republican, Hayes, even though he had received a minority
of the popular vote.
-Southern Democrats were willing to accept Hayes if they could get something in return.
-The price they demanded was:
1. The withdrawal of federal troops from Louisiana and South Carolina—two of the three
Southern states that Republicans still governed.
2. The Democrats wanted federal money to build a railroad from Texas to the West Coast and to
improve Southern rivers, harbors, and bridges.
3. They wanted Hayes to appoint a conservative Southerner to the cabinet.
-In the Compromise of 1877, Republican leaders agreed to these demands, and Hayes was peacefully
inaugurated.
-The acceptance of this compromise meant the end of Reconstruction in the South.
B. Home Rule in the South
-After the 1876 election, Republicans and Democrats disputed the results in Louisiana’s and South
Carolina’s elections, and both states ended up with two rival state governments.
-Republicans no longer controlled the government of any Southern state.
-The Democrats had achieved their long-desired goal of home rule—the ability to run state governments
without federal intervention.
-They passed laws that restricted the rights of African Americans, wiped out social programs, slashed
taxes, and dismantled public schools.
C. Legacy of Reconstruction
-Despite the efforts of African Americans and many Radical Republicans, Reconstruction ended without
much real progress in the battle against discrimination.
-Radical Republicans made some mistakes:
1. They extended civil rights to freed persons, but Congress did not adequately protect those
rights, and the Supreme Court undermined them.
2. The Radicals balked at distributing land to former slaves, which prevented them from
becoming economically independent of the landowning planter class.
3. The Radicals did not fully realize the extent to which deep-seated racism in society would
weaken the changes that Congress had tried to make.
-On the bright side, the Thirteenth amendment permanently abolished slavery in all of the states. Radical
Republicans did succeed in passing the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments, and although Supreme
Courts narrowed the interpretation of the amendments during the 1870s, they remained part of the
Constitution.
-During the Reconstruction, African Americans had founded many black colleges and volunteer
organizations, and the percentage of literate African Americans had gradually increased. The memory of
this time of expanding opportunities lived on in the African-American community and inspired the fight
to regain civil rights.