Reconstruction

In the history of the United States, "Reconstruction" was the period after the American Civil War when the southern states of the breakaway Confederate States of America|Confederacy were reintegrated into the United States of America.

The failure of Reconstruction

Reconstruction officially ended in 1877 when the South agreed to accept Rutherford B. Hayes's victory if the North withdrew federal troops from the South. The end of Reconstruction marked the demise of most civil, political, and economic rights and opportunities for African Americans, and ushered in an era some historians refer to as the nadir of American race relations. Blacks would legally and socially remain second-class citizens until the civil rights movement of the mid-twentieth century. The end of Reconstruction also marked the end of the nascent interracial working peoples' alliances that had tentatively begun to form in the South. In exchange for its acceptance of reintegration into the Union, the South was allowed to reestablish a segregated, race-discriminatory society, and Congress was reorganized to give elite Southern legislators extraordinary power, lasting into the mid-twentieth century. By reestablishing a firm racial hierarchy, the one-party Southern elites maintained much more effective control of working people and working conditions; and non-elite whites received the satisfaction of knowing that their own lives would at least have more value than those of their dehumanized African-American neighbors. The initial flurry of Reconstruction civil rights measures was eroded and converted into laws that expanded racial dictatorship throughout American institutions and everyday life. The resurrection and expansion of the racist society provided a solid basis for both the pronounced limitations of the American labor movement and the associated paucity and frailty of democratic social entitlements in the U.S.

Related Topics:
Nadir of American race relations - Segregated

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In response to Reconstruction, the South also swayed Congress to pass the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibited federal military authorities from exercising localized civilian police powers. This was in direct response to President Grant's successful but short-lived use of the military in the south to supress white supremacists campaign of terror and intimidation against blacks and their Republican supporters.

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In the demise of Reconstruction, much of the civil rights legislation was overturned by the United States Supreme Court. Most notably, the court suggested in the "Slaughterhouse Case" 83 US 36 (1873), then held in the Civil Rights Cases 109 US 3 (1883), that the Fourteenth Amendment only gave Congress the power to outlaw public, rather than private discrimination. Plessy v. Ferguson 163 US 537 (1896) went even further, announcing that state-mandated segregation was legal as long as the statute or ordinance provided for "separate but equal" facilities. By 1905, in Lochner v. New York, 198 U.S. 45, the Supreme Court had retooled the fourteenth amendment into a law protecting the autonomy of corporations, rather than protecting the citizenship of African-Americans or similarly-oppressed people born or naturalized into the United States.

Related Topics:
United States Supreme Court - Slaughterhouse Case - 1873 - Civil Rights Cases - 1883 - Plessy v. Ferguson - 1896 - Statute - Ordinance - Separate but equal

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The Supreme Court maintained "separate but equal" for almost sixty years until finally admitting that its implementation was almost always highly unequal. The Court abandoned it, reversing Plessy in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka 347 US 483 (1954). It was not until the mid 1960s that the civil rights movement grew strong enough to win political reforms which weakened the system of private racial discrimination entrenched in the shadow of state Jim Crow laws. The government finally passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed discrimination in "public accommodations," i.e., restaurants, hotels and businesses open to the public, as well as in private schools and workplaces.

Related Topics:
Separate but equal - Brown v. Board of Education - Topeka - 1954 - 1960 - Jim Crow laws - Civil Rights Act of 1964

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