Redemption phase III 1873-77 study guide

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Redemption phase III 1873-77 study guide

Phase III: Redemption 1873-77

The End of Reconstruction
During Grant’s second term, it was apparent that Reconstruction had entered another phase, which proved to be its final round. With Radical Republican on the wane, southern conservatives-known as Redeemers-took control of one state government after another. This process was completed by 1877. The redeemers had different social and economic backgrounds, but they agreed on their political program: states’ rights, reduced taxes, reduced spending on social programs, and white supremacy.

White Supremacy and The Ku Klux Klan
At the same time these changes were taking place in the South, Africans Americans often faced resentment from many Southern whites. Unable to strike openly a the Republicans running their states, some Southern opponents organized secret societies to undermine Republican rule known as the Ku Klux Klan founded in 1867 by an ex-Confederate general, Nathaniel Bedford Forrest. They terrorized many and African Americans by burning black-owned buildings, flogged and murdered freedmen to keep them from exercising their voting rights. Many responded to the attacks by organizing their own militias to fight back. President Grant and Congress took action against the KKK passing three Enforcement Acts which outlawed the activities of the Klan. Although they arrested more than 3,000 Klan members they only convicted about 600 members and fewer still served any time in prison.

Rise of Jim Crow
For African Americans, the New South closely resembled the Old South. They were still tied to the land through sharecropping and by their exclusion from most factory jobs. By now Democrats had taken control of Congress and stepped up their attempts to strip African Americans of their rights. To deprive African Americans of the right to vote, southern legislature instituted poll taxes-which were fixed taxes on every voter- and literacy tests- test that barred those who couldn’t read from voting. Even literate blacks failed the exam because the white officials decided who passed. To deprive African Americans of their rights, state legislatures passed the Jim Crow laws. Originally passed in Tennessee in 1881, the first of these laws required separate railway cars, but by the 1890’s all southern states had legally segregated public transportation and schools. Soon segregation would extended to cemeteries, public parks, and other public places. Once incident of upholding segregation was in 1896 in the famous Plessy v Ferguson Supreme Court case. The case was brought in after African American Homer Plessy was denied a seat in a first class railway car. The court ruled that “separate but equal” facilities did not violate the 14th Amendment.

Booker T. Washington and Ida B. Wells
How African American’s should respond to racism was not always agreed on by Black leaders like Washington and Wells.
Booker T. Washington felt that freedom would come through economic prosperity and encouraged African Americans to educate themselves by learning a trade or skill instead of protesting.
Ida B. Wells focused her attention on stopping the lynching of African American and used fiery editorials to protest injustices.

Greed and Corruption: The Troubled Grant Administration
Throughout Grant’s first term many Republicans expressed their concerns that some men were in office to make money and sell their influence and were beginning to dominate the Republican Party. These critics broke away and created the Liberal Republican Party and nominated Horace Greeley as their presidential nominee (1872).
Although Grant easily won the re-election, a series of scandals damaged his reputation.
In 1869, for example, two Wall Street financiers, Jay Gould and James Fisk, obtained the help of President Grant’s brother-in-law in a scheme to corner the gold market (TD broke scheme though Gould made a fortune).
In the Credit Mobilier affair, insiders gave stock to influential members of Congress to avoid investigation of the profits they were making- as high as 348 %- from government subsidies (money that comes from the government) for building the transcontinental railroad.
In one scandal Grant’s secretary of state William Belknap was found to have accepted bribes from merchants operating an army post in the West (resigned before found guilty). Then in 1875, the Whiskey Ring scandal broke when a group of government officials and distillers in St Louis cheated the government out of millions of dollars by filing false tax reports (one of Grant’s private secretary was reported to be involved).

Panic of 1873
Grant’s second term began with an economic disaster that rendered thousands of northern laborers both jobless and homeless. In 1873 over speculation by financiers and overbuilding by industry and railroads led to widespread business failures and depression. Debtors on the farms and in the cities sought an inflationary, easy-money solution by demanding Greenback paper money that wasn’t supported by gold. In 1874, Grant finally decided to side with the hard-money bankers and creditors who wanted a stable money supply backed by gold and vetoed a bill calling for the release of additional Greenbacks.

Reconstruction Ends
Grant’s troubled administration and the depression put the Democrats back in control of the House and made gains in the Senate. They did so through intimidation and fraud. They also won back support by promising to cut the high taxes the Republicans had imposed and accused Republicans of corruption (crusade to save the South from Republican rule).
In 1876 Rutherford B Hayes ran against Samuel Tilden during the presidential election. On Election Day, twenty electoral votes were disputed. Nineteen of the votes were in the three Southern states controlled by Republicans, and congressional leaders worked out an agreement known as the Compromise of 1877.

The Compromise of 1877 said:

Southern Democrats agreed to give the election to Hayes, and in return, the Republicans promised that a Southerner would be post master general (controlled many federal jobs)
Republicans promised funds for internal improvements in the South (transcontinental railroad)
Republicans along with Hayes agreed to withdraw the remaining federal troops from the South protecting blacks and other Republicans.

In April 1877, after assuming the presidency, Hayes did pull federal troops out of the South. Without soldiers to support them, the last remaining Republican governments in the South collapsed, and Reconstruction had come to an end.
The end of the federal military presence in the South wasn’t the only thing that brought this era to and end. In a series of decisions in the 1880’s and 1890’s ,the Supreme Court struck down one Reconstruction law after another that protected blacks from discrimination. Supporters of the New South promised a future of industrial development, but most southern blacks and whites in the decades after the Civil War remained poor farmers, and they fell further behind the rest of the nation.

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