Events
1873
Depression of 1873 hits
Supreme Court hears Slaughterhouse Cases
1874
Democrats become majority party in House of Representatives
1875
Civil Rights Act of 1875 passed
1876
Samuel J. Tilden and Rutherford B. Hayes both claim
victory in presidential election
1877
Congress passes Electoral Count Act
Hayes becomes presidentHayes removes remaining troops from the South
to end Reconstruction
Key People
-
Rutherford B. Hayes
Ohio governor chosen to run against Democrat Samuel
J. Tilden in the presidential election of 1876;
received fewer popular and electoral votes than Tilden but became
president after Compromise of 1877
-
Samuel J. Tilden
Famous New York prosecutor; ran for president on
Democratic ticket against Rutherford B. Hayes in election of 1876;
fell one electoral vote shy of becoming president
Waning Interest in Reconstruction
As the Depression of 1873 wore
on into the mid-1870s,
northern voters became decreasingly interested in southern Reconstruction. With
unemployment high and hard currency scarce, northerners were more
concerned with their own financial well-being than in securing rights
for freedmen, punishing the Ku Klux Klan, or readmitting secessionist
states. After Democrats capitalized on these depression conditions
and took control of the House of Representatives in 1874,
Reconstruction efforts stalled.
The Civil Rights Act of 1875
The Radical Republicans’ last successful piece of legislation
in Congress was the Civil Rights Act of 1875.
The bill aimed to eliminate social discrimination and forbade discrimination
in all public places, such as theaters, hotels, and restaurants.
The bill stated that blacks should be treated as equals under the
law and that they could sue violators of the law in federal court.
Unfortunately, the act proved ineffective, as Democrats
in the House made sure the bill was unenforceable. The act stated
that blacks had to file claims to defend their own rights; the federal
government could not do it for them. Many blacks were still poor
and worked hard to make a living, and House Democrats knew that lawsuits
would require money and considerable effort.
Democrats Take the South
Meanwhile, Democrats were steadily regaining control of
the South, as the already-weak Republican presence in region only became
weaker as northerners lost interest in Reconstruction. The Depression
of 1873,
along with continued pressure from the Ku Klux Klan,
drove most white Unionists, carpetbaggers, and scalawags out
of the South by the mid-1870s,
leaving blacks alone to fight for radical legislation. Democrats
regained their seats in state legislatures, beginning with majorities
in Virginia and Tennessee in 1869 and
moving steadily onward to other states. Many Democrats used violence
to secure power, and several Republicans were murdered in Mississippi
in the 1875 elections.
Blacks continued to be terrorized and intimidated into not voting.
By 1877,
Democrats had majorities in every southern state.
The Slaughterhouse Cases
The shift of political power in the South was only one
cause of the end of Radical Reconstruction. The other key factor
was a series of sweeping Supreme Court rulings in the 1870s
and 1880s
that weakened radical policy in the years before. The first of these
were the 1873Slaughterhouse
Cases, so named because they involved a suit against a New
Orleans slaughterhouse. In these cases, the conservative Supreme
Court ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment protected U.S. citizens
from rights infringements only on a federal level, not on a state
level.
United States v. Cruikshank
Moreover, in 1876,
the Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Cruikshank that
only states, not the federal government, could prosecute individuals
under the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871.
As a result, countless Klan crimes went unpunished by southern state
governments, who tacitly condoned the violence.
