A SURVEY OF AMERICAN HISTORY

Unit 3: Reconstruction and UrbanizationPart 5: Reconstruction Ends

THE COMPROMISE OF 1877

• As the end of Ulysses S. Grant’s second term approached, the presidential election of 1876 was hotly contested.

• The Republican candidate, Rutherford B. Hayes, lost to the Democratic candidate, Samuel Tilden, by a wide margin: more than 200,000 individual votes and more than twenty votes in the Electoral College.

• However, the Electoral College votes of Florida, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Oregon were in dispute.

THE COMPROMISE OF 1877

• Behind the scenes, Republican dealmakers arrived at a compromise with Democratic dealmakers. The Democrats agreed to let the Republicans claim the remaining Electoral College votes, thereby awarding the Presidency to Hayes, if the Republicans agreed to withdraw all federal troops in the South, bringing Reconstruction to an end.

• Ulysses S. Grant began removing the troops towards the end of his term.

THE REDEEMERS TAKE CONTROL

In the South, the Republican Party had maintained power through a coalition of carpetbaggers, scalawags, and freedmen. Following the withdrawal of troops, the Republicans lost power in the South to Democratic ‘Redeemers,’ who established state governments on the principle of white supremacy.

THE GREAT RAILROAD STRIKE

• One of Hayes’ first challenges as President was the Great Railroad Strike of 1877.

• In 1873, the American economy crashed, and since then the major railroad companies had suffered financial losses.

• In 1877, they attempted to make up for these losses by cutting the wages of workers.

• In July 1877, workers in West Virginia walked off the job.

THE GREAT RAILROAD STRIKE

• Hayes feared that the strike would turn into a riot, so he sent federal troops to intervene. But instead of finding a riot in progress, the troops found only a peaceful protest.

• However, their intervention sparked riots elsewhere. Before July was over, riots had broken out in Baltimore, Pittsburg, Chicago, and St. Louis.

• Hayes dispatched more federal troops, who finally put down these riots to end what was the largest labor dispute until then.

THE NEZ PERCE UPRISING

• At about the same time, an attempt to move the Nez Perce Indians onto a reservation provoked an Indian uprising.

• The Nez Perce entered a conflict with the United States Army. Then, under the leadership of Chief Joseph, the tribe fled to Canada to meet with Sitting Bull, who was in exile after the Battle of the Little Bighorn, to request assistance from the Lakota Sioux.

THE NEZ PERCE UPRISING

• After Sitting Bull declined to offer assistance, the Nez Perce were pursued and captured by William T. Sherman and sent to a reservation in Kansas.

• The Nez Perce uprising demonstrated that Native American resistance to the policies of removal and relocation remained strong.

• This resistance would culminate in a spiritual movement with an element of civil disobedience, towards the end of the century.

RECONSTRUCTION ENDS

• In the early 1870s, paramilitary groups emerged in the South, including the White League of Louisiana and the Red Shirts, founded in Mississippi.

• These groups essentially adopted the objectives of the Ku Klux Klan without adopting the Klan’s theatrical tactics.

• Their main objective was to keep Republicans out of office.

• The history of the White League was especially notorious...

THE WHITE LEAGUE

• In 1873, during a gubernatorial election in Louisiana, three hundred white men, mostly Confederate Army veterans, attempted to take control of the government of Grant Parish.

• About five hundred freedmen surrounded and dug trenches around the courthouse in the town of Colfax to stop the white militiamen from taking over.

• The militiamen captured most of the freedmen. They slaughtered fifty in cold blood and killed up to a hundred more in a conflict known as the Colfax Massacre.

THE WHITE LEAGUE

• These militiamen went on to form the White League in 1874.

• Later that year, having amassed about five thousand members, they forced more than three thousand police and state militiamen to remove the Republican Governor from power in New Orleans.

• Their efforts led to armed conflict in what is known as the Battle of Liberty Place. The Governor was removed by force, but restored when federal troops intervened.

JIM CROW BEGINS

• Towards the end of the 1870s, in the middle of Hayes’ term as President, many members of these groups joined the state militias that replaced federal troops in the South.

• They helped the Democratic Redeemers gain power over the Republicans. Once in power, the Redeemers began passing what would become known as the Jim Crow laws.

• In 1879, Congressional Democrats managed to repeal the Enforcement Acts that outlawed the Ku Klux Klan.

JIM CROW BEGINS

• The Jim Crow laws segregated the Southern states. Black and white citizens were held to be ‘separate but equal.’

• These laws did not deny the rights of black citizens, but they empowered groups and established systems that impeded or inhibited attempts to exercise those rights.

• In the process, they separated black citizens from white citizens, effectively creating two classes of citizenship, while technically allowing black citizens to retain ‘equal’ rights.

BOOKER T. WASHINGTON

• Despite the removal of federal troops from the South and the rise of Democratic Redeemers, the struggle for true African American equality continued.

• In 1881, Hayes’ final year in power, Booker T. Washington, an African American teacher, founded the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama on the site of a former slave plantation.

• The Institute’s purpose was to help black workers to develop the technical skills required for particular jobs, empowering them through employment.

A SURVEY OF AMERICAN HISTORY

Unit 3: Reconstruction and UrbanizationPart 5: Reconstruction Ends