AP® United States History · Unit 5 · Topic 5.11
The Failure of Reconstruction
Reconstruction failed because northern will to enforce Black civil rights drained away even as the amendments stayed in the Constitution, letting southern white Democrats violently "redeem" their states and the Compromise of 1877 finish the job.
Reconstruction did not end because anyone repealed the 13th, 14th, or 15th Amendments. It ended because the North stopped enforcing them. By the early 1870s northerners were tired of occupying the South, worried about the economy, and increasingly willing to believe southern white claims that Black suffrage had caused corruption and misrule. Groups like the Ku Klux Klan exploited this fatigue with campaigns of murder, whipping, and intimidation aimed at Black voters and Republican officials. State by state, these paramilitary campaigns helped white Democrats 'redeem' southern governments, meaning they threw out Reconstruction coalitions and reclaimed political control, often through fraud and terror rather than fair elections.
The Supreme Court helped hollow out the 14th Amendment from the other direction. In the Slaughterhouse Cases of 1873, the Court read the amendment's protections so narrowly that it barely restrained state governments at all. In United States v. Cruikshank in 1876, the Court ruled that the amendment restrained only state action, not violence by private individuals or mobs, which meant the federal government could not prosecute most Klan terror under it. Legally hollowed out and politically abandoned, the amendments became promises without enforcement.
The disputed election of 1876 delivered the final blow. With the electoral count contested, Republicans and Democrats struck the Compromise of 1877: Rutherford B. Hayes got the presidency, and Democrats got the removal of the last federal troops from the South. Without soldiers to protect Black voters, Redeemer governments moved quickly, setting up the segregation, disenfranchisement, and racial violence of the Jim Crow era that lasted into the twentieth century.
Key terms
- Redeemer governments
- White Democratic state governments that took back political control of southern states from Reconstruction coalitions.
- Compromise of 1877
- The political deal giving Hayes the presidency in exchange for withdrawing remaining federal troops from the South.
- Slaughterhouse Cases (1873)
- Supreme Court decision that narrowly interpreted the 14th Amendment, limiting its power to protect citizens from state abuses.
- United States v. Cruikshank (1876)
- Supreme Court ruling that the 14th Amendment restrained only state governments, not private individuals or mobs, shielding Klan violence from federal prosecution.
- Mississippi Plan
- An 1875 strategy of organized violence and intimidation used by white Democrats to suppress Black voting and seize political control.
Watch it explained
- How it worksWalk me through the Klan and paramilitary violence redeeming one southern state at a time.
- Worked exampleTrace the disputed election of 1876 to the Compromise of 1877 and the last troops leaving.
- How it worksHow do the Slaughterhouse and Cruikshank rulings hollow out the 14th Amendment?
- Ties togetherHow does the end of Reconstruction set up the Jim Crow system of the next eighty years?
Check yourself
End of topic.