UNDOING RECONSTRUCTIONAPUSH - Spiconardi

Sharecropping & Tenant Farming• Landowners rented land to

farmers who usually supplied them with farming tools and a crude house, farmers grew crops for landowners and kept a small percentage, often not enough to sell.• Farmers often lived in poverty

Sharecropping

“My boy, we’ve toiled and taken care of you long enough – now you’ve got to work”

Harper’s Weekly, July 29, 1865

Overthrow of Reconstruction• Much of the South opposed

Reconstruction and the new state governments• Declared the governments to be• Corrupt• Examples of “black supremacy”• Tax heavy

• In order to restore white supremacy, southerners turned to violence

Ku Klux Klan• A terrorist organization

founded in Tennessee in 1866• Served as the military arm of the

Southern Democratic Party

• Committed acts of violence and terror against• Blacks• White Republicans (judges,

teachers, politicians)

• In 1873, the Klan attacked Colfax, LA with a small cannon

Ku Klux Klan• Grant dispatches federal

marshals to arrest members of the KKK• Many were put on trial• By 1872, the Klan ceased to

exist (until 1920s)

1865 1874

Waning Northern Interest in Reconstruction

• Reasons• Media depictions of southern governments being a mass

of “black barbarianism” and corruption • Panic of 1873• North too worried about economic problems to care about the

South

• Democratic gains in Congress• Democrats took control of the House in 1874

• Supreme Court Rulings• Slaughterhouse Case (1873)• Court ruled that most of the rights of citizens remained under state

jurisdiction

Bargain of 1877• Republican controlled

Florida, South Carolina, and Louisiana claimed voter fraud and voter intimidation• Declared these three

states electoral votes go to Republican Rutherford B. Hayes

• Redeemer Democrats submitted their own electoral votes for Samuel J. Tilden

Bargain of 1877• The Constitution did not

provide guidelines for this situation

• An electoral commission worked out a deal in which Hayes would be president under the following conditions:• A democrat would be appointed to

the cabinet• Federal aid would be given to Texas

to build a railroad• Republicans would not interfere in

the South’s local affairs• Most Union troops would be

removed

• The “Solid South” was restored