For most of the modern era the process of ending wars involved representatives of the warring nations sitting down at a table and arranging some sort of peace. Depending on the duration, the intensity and the issues over which the war was fought, peace settlements could range from harsh to generous.  An unspoken but generally understood assumption was that the warring parties would be likely to meet on the battlefield again, with the results quite possibly reversed, and thus over-harsh settlements were rare.

Such a resolution was impossible following the American Civil War for the simple reason that the two warring parties—the Union and the Confederacy—were not held to be equal because the war had been fought over the Confederacy’s right to exist as a separate nation. The Union victory in effect ended the Confederacy’s claim to political independence, and thus from the Union perspective there was no other party with whom to negotiate a peace settlement.  That meant that it was up to the federal government to decide exactly how the defeated Confederate states were to be treated.

Reconstruction: Lincoln’s View

President Lincoln had actually tried to start the reconstruction process before the Civil War ended. In 1863 Lincoln issued a Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction, which stated that states where 10% of the 1860 electorate would take an oath of loyalty to the Union and agree to emancipation might be readmitted. Congress refused to recognize Lincoln's plan and countered with the Wade-Davis Bill, a much harsher approach, which Lincoln vetoed.  But Lincoln did not back off from his intention to treat the South generously.  In his famous Second Inaugural Address, which is inscribed on the wall of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, he closed with the words:

With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and his orphan...to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.
            
Following Lee’s surrender at Appomattox President Lincoln again outlined a generous plan for reconstruction.  Sadly, the President did not live to see his ideas realized.  On April 14, 1865, Lincoln went to Ford’s theater to attend to play with his wife. John Wilkes Booth, a Virginia actor enraged by the South’s defeat, made his way to the presidential box and shot the president in the head.  Lincoln was carried across the street and placed in a bedroom where he died the next morning. Lincoln’s assassination dealt a fatal blow to hopes for a more successful reconstruction effort than what actually occurred. His death also put the North in bad mood about the South, and wiped out much potential sympathy. Winston Churchill later wrote that the bullet that killed Lincoln did “more damage than all the Confederate cannonade put together.” Lincoln had been seen by many as a messiah, especially with his death coming on Good Friday, and even a few Southerners realized they had lost a friend.

Vice President Andrew Johnson succeeded to the presidency upon Lincoln's death.  He apparently intended to carry out Lincoln's generous reconstruction policies, but as a Southerner who had remained loyal to the north, his motivations were quite different from those of Lincoln.  Powerful Republican Congressmen visited with Johnson to assess his attitudes toward the defeated South, and initially, at least, came away satisfied that Johnson was on the right track.  That assessment, however, would soon change radically.

Reconstruction Issues: The large and complex issue of reconstruction became yet another chapter in the ongoing struggle over political power in the United States. An entire party—the Whigs—had come into existence over that issue during the Jackson era. President Lincoln had been a powerful political leader during the war, and Congress sometimes bridled under his forceful direction of the government. With Lincoln's assassination and the accession of Vice President Andrew Johnson to the highest office in the land, the stage was set for a showdown between Congress and the White House.  Some even felt a need to move toward a system similar to that in Great Britain, where the head of state, the monarch, was becoming more of a figurehead than a political force.

What that meant was that reconstruction of the South, which was bound to be a challenging endeavor, was complicated further by the tension between the institutions at opposite ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. In the absence of constitutional guidelines, the president and Congress waged a bitter fight over how best to reconstruct the Union. The North was split on the question of reconstructing the South. Some Northerners, led by the White House, wanted speedy Reconstruction with a minimum of changes in the South. Other Northerners, led by Congress, wanted a slower Reconstruction and demanded that the rights of freed African-Americans be protected. In fact, the struggle between Congress and the President moved  outside the context of Reconstruction and became a fight in its own right, leading to the impeachment of President Johnson in 1868.

Reconstruction was a complicated legal and political issue: What was the legal status of the former Confederacy? Were the rebellious states still in the Union? Reconstruction attempts actually began before war started with the Crittenden Committee and attempts at compromise, but those attempts were bound to fail, given the mood in 1861. The Supreme Court eventually decided in 1869 (Texas v. White) that secession was unconstitutional, but that Congress could still dictate the terms under which the seceded states could rejoin the Union because of Article IV, Section 4 of the Constitution.

Northern Attitudes: In the North, with the exception of thousands of shattered families, many with wounded veterans back in their midst, there was little to reconstruct, since most of the fighting was in the South. Northerners buried their dead, cared for the wounded and did their best to get on with their lives.  Although it is safe to say that the majority of Northerners were happy to see slavery gone, if for no other reason than the fact that the divisiveness of the issue had poisoned the political scene for decades, it cannot be assumed that the attitudes of all Northerners were friendly to the full incorporation of blacks into the national fabric. On the other hand, most Northerners did expect the South to accept the verdict of the war and to do whatever would be necessary to reconcile themselves to the end of that “peculiar institution” of slavery.

Northerners felt little vindictiveness toward their southern brethren, but they lacked a sense of patience. The punishment of the South was very mild by comparison with other lost rebellions: Only one man was hanged, and there were few jail sentences for what many considered outright treason. No one was fined and there was no confiscation of property. But the South did have to accept certain things: the end of secession doctrine; the end of slavery; and the end of control of the South by the old southern aristocracy, to be replaced for a time by northern control. 

Most Northerners generally did not want “special” treatment of Blacks. At least one writer has claimed that there was little of the misery, hatred and repression by which the South has been characterized, and that most of the South was peaceful and happy after the war. Northerners were obviously far less concerned with Reconstruction than South, but many northerners were not happy about prospects of millions of Blacks invading the job market and perhaps jeopardizing their economic security. Most white northerners wished Blacks well, but weren’t willing to do much to help them; yet many teachers, including women from New England, went South to help Blacks. These northerners included the so-called “carpetbaggers,” who were infamous in their time (and after) but who, according to recent studies, did much good as well.

Once Northerners had honored and mourned their dead and taken care of widows and orphans, they got back down to work building railroads, factories, businesses, settling the west, fighting the Indian wars and finding room for the 25 million immigrants who came to the United States between 1865 and 1910. One significant result of the war for the North was the fighting experience of thousands of soldiers who became laborers in the growing industries and often used the same tactics they employed on the battlefield against their bosses. 

Southern Attitudes: Many Southerners were enraged at the outcome of the war. Having suffered and bled and died to get out of the Union, they now found themselves back in it. A woman in Richmond wrote in her diary after the hated Yankees raised the American flag over the former Confederate capitol, “I once loved that flag, but now I hate the very sight of it!” Southerners recognized that they had to bow to the results of their loss, but did so with underlying hatred. Much ill feeling toward the North existed among the people who had stayed at home, especially in areas invaded by Sherman and others: wives, widows, orphans and those who had endured incredible hardships were particularly horrified to be back under federal control, ruled by their former enemies.

Many Southern whites, having convinced themselves in the prewar years that Blacks were incapable of running their own lives, were also unable to understand what freedom meant to Blacks. As one former slave expressed it, “Bottom rung on top now, Boss.” Many whites were still convinced slavery had been right. In a migration reminiscent of the departure of loyalists after the Revolution, many southerners took their slaves and went to Brazil, where the institution still flourished. Others went west to get as far away from “those damn Yankees” as they could.

Condition of the Former Slaves: Many slaves who had been restricted all their lives had no “where” to go—although they were elated to be free: the great day of jubilation, it was called—but this new state of freedom also caused confusion. Some stayed on old plantations, others wandered off in search of lost family. Many slave owners were glad to get rid of “burdensome slaves” and threw them out “just like those Yankee capitalists.”  Some Freedmen celebrated their freedom openly, others, less trusting, approached their new status with caution.  As they quickly learned, there was more to being free than just not being owned as a slave.  When asked how it felt to be free by a member of a Congressional investigating committee, one former slave said, “I don’t know.” When challenged to explain himself, he said, “I’ll be free when I can do anything a white man can do.” One does not have to be a historian to know that such a degree of freedom was a long time coming.

The Meaning of Freedom: For African Americans, the most important single result of War was freedom—“the great watershed of their lives.”  Pertinent phrases include: “I feel like a bird out of a cage ... Amen ... Amen ... Amen!”  Freedom came “like a blaze of glory.”  “Freedom burned in the heart long before freedom was born.” The search for lost families was “awe inspiring.”  Some whites claimed that Blacks did not understand freedom and were to be “pitied.”  But Blacks had observed a free society, and they knew it meant an end to injustices against former slaves.

Blacks in the South also had a workable society—church, family and later schools.  A Black culture already existed, and could be adapted, with difficulty, to be sute, to new conditions of freedom. Blacks also took quickly to politics. As one author has put it, they watched the way their former masters voted and then did the opposite. Remarkably, Southern Blacks exhibited little overt resentment against their former masters, and many adopted a conciliatory attitude. When they got into the legislatures they did not push hard for reform because they recognized the reality of white power.

(On the topic of freedom for former slaves, see Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 and Page Smith, Trial by Fire: A People's History of the Civil War and Reconstruction.)

Radical Reconstruction: In contrast to the relatively lenient and passive approach of Lincoln and Johnson, the radical Republicans, the liberal wing of the Republican Party, had a much tougher approach. They were idealists, many of them driven by an almost religious fervor. They did not accept the commonly held notion that Blacks were inferior and insisted on full political, social and civil rights for the former slaves. In this sense they were true reformers, in many ways far ahead of their time, and they had very different ideas about Reconstruction. They thought Lincoln was “too soft” on the South, and they wanted to “revolutionize Southern habits, institutions and manners”; they wanted to see the South rebuilt according to a new order. Northern Republican newspapers such as the New York Tribune agreed. Radicals believed that the South should be treated as “conquered provinces,” and that the rebel states had committed “political suicide.” They claimed that no state governments could exist in the South until Congress restored them under any conditions it deemed necessary.

After Lincoln’s death the Republicans held hearings on conditions in the South which revealed widespread mistreatment of blacks, as demonstrated within the Black Codes drawn up in many states.  Those Black codes prohibited blacks from owning firearms, required them to be employed or face vagrancy, and imposed fines which could be worked off by labor, and placed other restrictions on their freedom, in effect recreating a form of slavery in which the state rather than individuals for all practical purposes owned the slaves.  While it was understood that certain laws had to be passed in order to deal with slave codes that had existed prior to the 13th amendment, they went far beyond what was necessary to remove the former restrictions.

Those factors intensified Radical feelings about a heavy-handed reconstruction process.  Congressional moderates had more modest goals—to protect Blacks but not to grant them full equality or any special favors. Johnson’s reaction to Congressional initiatives, however, eventually drove many moderates into the radical camp.

The Battle Lines Are Drawn.  The fact that President Johnson was a Democrat, placed on the National Union party ticket in 1864 by President Lincoln in order to balance the team, did not help.  His demeanor often left much to be desired as well. (He had been drunk at President Lincoln's second inaugural.)  Since Congress was not in session when the war ended, Johnson proceeded to carry out what he honestly believed was Lincoln's policy on his own.  Radical leaders still in Washington visited Johnson shortly after the war ended and came away satisfied that he would do things properly.

President Johnson issued a proclamation of amnesty on May 29, 1865, citing Lincoln’s original attempts as background.  Exceptions were made for those who had held prior federal offices and later had positions in the Confederate government, but those could be dealt with by “special application” to the President for the sake of “the peace and dignity of the United States.” Over the course of the summer of 1865, President Johnson liberally issued pardons to many former high-ranking confederates, apparently pleased at the spectacle of former Southern aristocrats, some of whom had scorned Johnson, having to plead their case before him.

By the time Congress returned in December, Johnson felt that Reconstruction had been completed.  The Radicals were not so sure. If the president had declared that states were readmitted, however, how was Congress to assert its will? The answer lay in the Constitution, which states in Article I that “Each house shall be the judge of the...qualifications of its own members.” When Southern legislators returned to Washington, their numbers enhanced because the 3/5 rule for counting slaves was gone as a result of the 13th amendment, they were turned away.  By refusing to seat their congressional delegations, Congress effectively denied those states readmission to the Union.

Congress then set out its own plan for reconstruction, quite different from that proposed by Presidents Lincoln and Johnson. In February, 1866, a new Freedmen’s Bureau Bill was passed to counteract the Black Codes. Johnson vetoed the bill, but his veto was overridden. In March Congress passed the Trumbull Civil Rights Act, which granted blacks citizenship, in order to counter the Supreme Court decision in the Dred Scott case. The act affirmed the right of Freedmen to make contracts, sue, give evidence, buy, lease, convey personal and real property. The act excluded state statutes on segregation, but did not provide for public accommodations for blacks.  Johnson again vetoed the bill on constitutional grounds and also on the grounds that Southern Congressmen had been absent but was again overridden.

Johnson's vetoes infuriated the radical leaders, and in June they passed the 14th amendment because they feared that the Civil Rights Act might be declared unconstitutional.  Ratification of the 14th amendment was eventually made a condition for states to be readmitted to the Union. They upheld their exclusion of Southern Congressmen on the grounds of the Constitution’s Article IV, Section 4: “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government.” By excluding blacks from the political process, the Southern governments were not republican in form.

Every Southern state legislature except that of Tennessee refused to ratify the 14th amendment had persisted in applying Black codes to the Freedmen. Mistakenly thinking that the radical approach to Reconstruction was out of tune with Northern sentiment, the South decided to wait things out pending the results of the 1866 congressional elections. In August the National Union party, on which Lincoln and Johnson had been elected in 1864, challenged the radicals for the upcoming elections.

During the fall campaign President Johnson went on a speaking tour in opposition to the radicals, but his maladroit addresses simply aroused indignation and turned the voters toward the Republicans, who returned an overwhelmingly radical Congress. The huge Republican victory gave them a 43-11 majority in Senate, 143-49 in the House. With veto overrides certain to follow, the Radicals were in a position to take control of Reconstruction, which they proceeded to do. 
The first item on the radical agenda was a determination to crush the old southern ruling class. Radical Reconstruction soon became what one historian has called a “states’ righters’ nightmare” and an “exquisite chastisement” of the South. The first Reconstruction act was passed in March 2, 1867. It created five military districts and declared that the existing state governments were provisional only.  The states were required to call constitutional conventions with full manhood suffrage and to enroll blacks on voter rolls. They were also required to ratify their new state constitutions as well as the 14th amendment; then and only then would their representatives be readmitted to Congress.

President Johnson fought the Reconstruction acts by appointing governors who refused to fully comply. The states in turn stonewalled and refused to comply, finding loopholes in the act to avoid their full execution.  At the same time Congress passed the first Reconstruction Act, they also passed the Tenure of Office Act and the Command of the Army Act. The Tenure of Office Act stated that Johnson could not dismiss cabinet officers approved by the Senate without Senate approval, which was aimed at keeping Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, a Radical sympathizer, in his position. The Command of the Army Act was designed to control the president by requiring all Reconstruction actions to go through that she Chief of Staff of the Army Commander in chief of the Army, General Grant, also a Republican sympathizer. The two acts would later form the basis for President Johnson's impeachment.

In 1867 and 1868 Congress passed three supplementary Reconstruction acts designed to close loopholes in the original act, granting more authority to military governors and allowing simple majorities of the voters rather than majorities of the full population to decide elections. (Southerners had tried to avoid the provisions of the Reconstruction acts by advising white voters to boycott elections.)

The result of the Reconstruction acts, which President Johnson carried out, resulted in what has been called “military Reconstruction.” The military districts were overseen by U.S. Army generals, and Union soldiers were still present in the South.  The Republican party and the South grew strong as 700,000 blacks were registered to vote.  In addition to its black voters, the party consisted of Southern Unionists and northern Republicans who had moved south, the so-called “carpetbaggers.” The Southern State Conventions were dominated by Radical Republicans and Blacks participated in all of them. The new Constitutions, which were are generally quite progressive and often ahead of those of the North, guaranteed civil rights for Blacks and excluded former Confederates from high positions. Blacks had a majority of voters in many areas of the South.

The White Counterrevolution: In the months following the end of the Civil War many whites carried out acts of random violence against blacks, scapegoating them for the terrible results of the fighting.  The Ku Klux Klan was founded in 1866, and it and other white supremacy groups were well underway by 1867. The target of the clan was the Republican Party, both blacks and whites, as well as anyone who overtly assisted blacks in their quest for greater freedom and greater economic independence.

The result was what can only be called a reign of terror conducted by the clan and other groups over the next decades.  Thousands were killed or injured or driven from their homes or suffered property damage as buildings were burned and animals destroyed.  Blacks who tried to further the cause of the Republican Party were singled out for attack, as were whites who, for example, rented rooms to northern carpetbaggers, including school teachers.  Black men were beaten within an inch of their lives or even to death in front of horrified family members, and the fear of night riders often drove blacks into the woods to sleep because they felt they were not safe in their own homes.

Eventually the Congress passed various bills to control the violence and protect blacks from being deprived of their civil rights, but the enforcement of those acts was often lax and other means of intimidation often proved effective.

The impeachment of Andrew Johnson. President Johnson had infuriated the radicals with his vetoes even though they were overridden. When the president tried to sabotage radical Reconstruction by failing to administer it vigorously, Congress decided to try to remove him from office. When Johnson suspended Secretary of War Stanton in violation of the Tenure of Office Act, the radicals had an issue on which to proceed. In February 1868 the House voted to impeach the president by a vote of 126-47 for violating the acts and “attempting to bring disgrace and ridicule on Congress.”  Johnson was well defended in his trial before the Senate and was wise enough to stay away from the capitol and leave his defense up to his attorneys.

Meanwhile popular opinion had begun to turn against the Radical Republicans, who seemed to many to be willing to subvert the Constitution in order to accomplish what they wanted. The Radicals were forced to acknowledge that impeachment was a political act—a test of the power of the legislature—some would have it “as powerful as the British.” It was also personally directed against Johnson. The final outcome of the Senate trial, which failed to convict Johnson by one vote, may have been rigged because of fear that Ben Wade, who as President pro Tempore of the Senate was next in line for the White House, might have the advantage in the election of 1868.  The final vote of 35-19 left Johnson chastised, and he carried out Reconstruction for the remainder of his term without further incident.

By June 1868 Arkansas, North Carolina, South Carolina, Louisiana, Georgia, Alabama and Florida had been readmitted to the Union. Many of the governors, representatives and senators in those states were Northerners—“carpetbaggers”—who had taken advantage of the opportunities offered in the South after the war to establish  political careers by joining with black Republicans.  African Americans gained majorities in the legislatures of Louisiana and South Carolina.  Mississippi, Texas and Virginia were readmitted to the Union in 1870. Georgia was actually removed briefly after passing a bill barring blacks from political office. In order to continue in Congress they had to repeal the act.

In 1869 Congress passed the 15th Amendment and attempted for a few years afterward to suppress terrorist groups like the Ku Klux Klan, which had become strong enough to seize political control of some southern states. Although the 15th Amendment was created to ensure voting rights for all males, such devices as poll taxes and literacy tests were used to subvert the purpose of the amendment.

Also in 1969 the Supreme Court reached an important and often overlooked decision.  The case of Texas v. White arose over the matter of bonds issued by the Confederate government of Texas.  In reaching its decision the Court held that secession was inadmissible under the Constitution and that the Confederate state authorities never existed legally.  The decision included the statement that, “The Constitution . . . looks to be an indestructible Union, composed of indestructible states.” Furthermore, the Court stated, the Reconstruction acts were legal because Congress has the Constitutional duty to assure every state a republican form of government, as stated in Article IV, Section 4. 

The Election  of 1868. The Republican choice for president in 1868 was General Ulysses Grant, who along with President Lincoln was deemed the savior of the Union. His opponent, the Democratic candidate, was former Governor Horatio Seymour of New York.  Grant won the presidency in a fairly close election, as more than 450,000 Black voted for the former Union general. 

Serving during one of the most difficult periods in American history, Grant lacked the consistency and sense of purpose to be an effective administrator. Grant faced problems that might have defeated a better president, but he did not always help himself. Lacking political experience or strong political principles, he was by temperament not well suited to the job. Just as he had been an un-military general, he was an un-political president.  On the battlefield he was able to select competent commanders for the divisions in his armies and once he gave his orders, which were generally concise and clear, he was content to let generals like Sherman, McPherson, Schofield, and others carry out their missions without interference.

That hands-off approach, however, did not work as well in a political setting. His administration was tainted by controversy and corruption, and though he was never personally implicated, he was unable to see the damage it was doing to his administration. The troubles included “Credit Mobilier” Scandal, in which Union Pacific railroad managers formed a company to divert profits to themselves and others and gave shares in the company to politicians in order to get favorable legislation passed.

In the South Grant’s administration failed to sustain black suffrage against violent groups bent on restoring white supremacy. Organizations like the Ku Klux Klan used terrorism, insurrection, and murder to intimidate southern Republican governments and prospective black voters. With the Fifteenth Amendment severely threatened, Congress finally passed the “Force” Acts which allowed the president to use military force to quell insurrections.
Despite the scandals Grant was reelected in 1872, although many liberal Republicans supported New York Tribune publisher Horace Greeley. In 1873 a financial panic caused by current issues led to a depression that hung over the nation for several years. In 1875 Congress passed the Sumner Civil Rights Act, which called for equal rights in public places, conveyances,  and so on and stated that blacks could not be excluded from jury duty. The act was designed to go past the 14th amendment, but in 1883 the Supreme Court ruled the Sumner act unconstitutional in net the 14th amendment did not require equality in areas controlled by private interests. 

The Physical Reconstruction of the South: Much of the South was physically devastated and demoralized after the war. The former plantation owners still had their land but had lost much if not all of their capital. The former slaves comprised a large and experienced labor force but had neither land nor capital. Many former slaves believed in the precedent set by General Sherman that the federal government was going to supply them with "Forty Acres and a Mule." Sherman, however, had exceeded his authority, and the Constitution inhibited the ability of the government to confiscate or claim land "without due process of law."
Some sort of system of production had to be worked out, and what evolved was a combination of various plans that on the surface seemed reasonable: sharecropping, tenant farming and the crop lien system. Each system had as its basis a bargain among laborers, those who had land and those who owned or controlled capital. Each system was potentially beneficial to all parties, but each also contained the possibility of exploitation and fraud, as was shown in practice. Even poor whites became sharecroppers or tenant farmers, so there was nothing inherently discriminatory in any approach. In fact, by 1880 a significant portion of the former slaves had become landowners, and despite exploitation and abuses, they system brought a moderate amount of cooperative self-reliance to the parties involved.

The South also needed capital to rebuild railroads and make other internal improvements, and those needs generated a reawakening of the South in the post-Civil War years that slowly brought new prosperity to the region. It was hard won, however, and many of the losses suffered by the Confederacy were never regained. The economic ups and downs of the industrial era often hit the South especially hard.

End of the Reconstruction Era

By 1876 many people both North and South had grown tired of Reconstruction and wanted to forget the Civil War altogether. It had become apparent that the problems of the South could not be resolved by tough federal legislation, no matter how well intended. In May 1872, Congress had passed a general Amnesty Act which restored political rights to most remaining confederates. The Democratic Party was restored to control in many Southern states, and Black voting rights began to be curtailed by one means or another.

The election of 1876 was the vehicle by which Reconstruction was finally ended.  The candidates were former Union General Rutherford B. Hayes of Ohio, Republican, and New York Democratic Governor Samuel Tilden. The campaign was carried out well below high Level, and corruption and treason were the charges which the parties leveled at each other. Hayes had to answer for the crimes of the Grant administration while Republicans continued to call the Democrats the party of treason. As the campaign drew to a close Tilden was regarded as the favorite, and on the night of the final vote taking even Hayes believed that he had lost.

The winter of 1876-1877 thus became one of confusion and bitterness as the outcome of the election was smothered in doubt. To this day it is not clear who really won. When the electoral votes had been counted, it turned out that in three Southern states—South Carolina, Florida and Louisiana—the election returns were in question. Because of alleged intimidation and other reasons charges arose that the election had been stolen in those three states. The apparent results gave those three states to Hayes, which meant that he would have won in the Electoral College by one vote; but if any of those results were overturned, Tilden would have become the victor. The question was, how could the conflict be resolved?

Congress did what it usually does when faced with a difficult and messy problem: it formed a committee. Originally the committee was comprised of seven Republicans seven Democrats and one independent, five Congressmen, five senators and five Supreme Court justices. But when it turned out that the independent became ineligible, he was replaced by a Republican, and they now had an 8-7 majority on the committee.

When the returns in the three states were examined, the committee decided not to “go behind the returns”—that is, they decided to accept the results as presented to Congress, in each case by a vote of 8 to 7. Thus all three states were given over to Hayes, but not without a fight. Democrats in Congress threatened to refuse to accept the committee recommendations, which would have thrown the nation into turmoil, with no new president to take office on March 4. Behind closed doors, in smoke-filled rooms, a deal was hatched: in return for allowing the committee's recommendations and giving the election over to Hayes, the Democrats exacted three promises in return. First, Reconstruction would be ended and all federal troops would be removed from the South. Second, the South would get a cabinet position in Hayes's government. And third, money for internal improvements would be provided by the federal government for use in the South.

The irony of the situation is that President Hayes was probably prepared to do those things in any case; but the Compromise of 1877 that ended Reconstruction was accepted. In April of that year federal troops marched out of the South, turning the Freedmen over, as Frederick Douglass put it, to the “rage of our infuriated former masters.”

All the advances that had been made for black people during Reconstruction slowly began to be undone. Through one means or another, voters were taken off the rolls, economic progress was thwarted, and although slavery was not restored, Freedmen and their descendents found life in the South growing increasingly difficult, a process that would not really begin to change until the civil rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s.

Although Reconstruction had ended the South had still not recovered from the war, and a decade of racial turmoil had demoralized both blacks and whites. Whereas the radical Republicans had supported civil rights for blacks and had tried to prevent white extremists from dominating the South, the government eventually backed off and began to turn a blind eye to discriminatory acts.  During the last quarter of the 19th century the Southern states passed many “Jim Crow” laws that resulted in segregated public schools and limited black access to public facilities, such as parks, restaurants and hotels. In addition, poll taxes and literacy tests, administered in a discriminatory manner, denied most blacks the right to vote.

Thus by 1877 the only people who were probably not fed up with Reconstruction were the Freedmen, and even they had seen enough violence and experienced enough frustration that they must have wondered indeed whether all this was worth the trouble. Most Northerners had been indifferent to Reconstruction because they had other things on their minds—the war had been over for 12 years, the dead were buried though not forgotten, and those wounds that could be healed had healed. The remainder continued to fester. The government—the United States Congress—was also tired of dealing with reconstruction because of other political issues that had to be resolved. The country had undergone a long-lasting financial recession beginning in 1873; Custer's men were wiped out at Little Bighorn in 1876; the first transcontinental railroad had been completed in 1869, but labor discontent was rising; and immigrants were pouring into the country at an ever-increasing rate. Thus the problems of the South had become something of a distraction.

Because of the impact of the Ku Klux Klan and a general high level of corruption that attended the democratic process in America from North to South and East to West, the electoral process, including presidential elections, was rough at best. In the North political machines told their voters to “vote early and often”; in the South the Reconstruction governments were also touched by corruption, and both black-and-white leaders found themselves unequal to the task of furthering the rights of Freedmen without further enraging whites.
Summary: Reconciliation of the two sections of the country came at the expense of southern blacks and poor whites. North and South reconciled after 1877, but only when it was agreed to strip African-Americans of their political gains and to turn the South back over to the “redeemers.”
In the “New South” upper-class “Redeemers” took power in the name of white supremacy and industrial development. The economy was dominated by northern capital and southern employers, landlords, and creditors. Economic and physical coercion, including hundreds of lynchings, effectively disenfranchised people of color. Some blacks, justifiably bitter at the depth of white racism, supported Black Nationalism and emigration to Africa, but most chose to struggle for improvement within American society. Over time, many migrated north or west in search of better opportunities.

The Redeemer regimes, often corrupt, welcomed northern investment, and northern control of southern economy. These governments neglected the problems of small farmers, black or white, who suffered from unpayable debts. Eventually, the small farmer organized his own political party in the 1890s. The Redeemers also began the process of legal segregation and invented ways of denying blacks the right to vote. North and South united, but at a heavy cost to the newly freed blacks. Despite attempts at industrialization, the South produced a smaller share of manufactures in 1900 than in 1860. The South had 30% of the population, 50% of the farmers. By 1880 the average annual income in South was half that of the national. The high rate of tenancy resulted in economic slavery for many.

It is hard but not impossible to say good things about Reconstruction. In later years, some Blacks looked back on Reconstruction as “the good old days,” when for a time anything seemed possible. The goals were land, the ballot, and education for Freedmen. Congress never supported land confiscation; even Radical governments in South were unable to achieve that. There was no “Marshall Plan” for the South, but on the other hand, the South was not brutalized. The only criminal executed was Henry Wirz of Andersonville Prison, and no fines and few imprisonments were imposed. Although there was hope—many understood the problems—goals were unrealized.

Summary of Reconstruction