The Impact of the Compromise of 1877

The Compromise of 1877 spelled the end of Reconstruction with dire implications for African Americans in the South. Federal troops were withdrawn from Southern states, and the laws meant to protect the rights of newly liberated Black citizens went unenforced. The withdrawal of the Union military presence allowed Southern white Democrats, as they were often called “Redeemers,” to retake political power and enact laws that denied civil rights to Black people (Glickman, 2024): The Impact of the Compromise of 1877.

With no federal oversight, states passed laws known as Black Codes and Jim Crow laws that codified racial segregation and disenfranchisement. African Americans also faced violent campaigns of voter suppression, economic exploitation through sharecropping, and the rise of white supremacist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan, which deployed the terror how to maintain and defend racial hierarchy. Advancements toward racial equality made during Reconstruction were rolled back as white-governed state governments repealed and codified civil rights.

The disintegration of Reconstruction left unopposed the growth of systemic racism in law and society. It was literacy tests, poll taxes, and grandfather clauses that stripped African Americans who would fight for the right to stay politically active the right to vote. Economically, most Black families remained locked into cycles of debt and poverty, bound to their former masters’ land through a sharecropping system that made upward mobility all but impossible. Unprotected at the federal level from being ignored by the states, these acts of racism were so rarely prosecuted that lynchings and race riots went unpunished more often than not, creating a climate of terror and repression.

The Compromise of 1877 cemented white supremacy in the South, ushering in nearly a decade of legalized racial discrimination under Jim Crow. Reconstruction had temporarily offered the promise of civil rights with the right to vote, but it led to white political pacts and proved less about free men than about the reconciliation of whites (Byman, 2021). The aftereffects of this compromise were such that African Americans would not achieve meaningful civil rights advances for decades.

References

Byman, D. (2021). White Supremacy, Terrorism, and the Failure of Reconstruction in the United States. International Security, 46(1), 53–103. MIT Press Direct. https://doi.org/10.1162/isec_a_00410

Glickman, L. B. (2024). “The Dark and Sad Days of Reconstruction”: The Politics of Memory in the Civil Rights Era. Modern American History, 7(3), 363–382. https://doi.org/10.1017/mah.2024.35

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