Reconstruction Ends and the South Moves to Redeem Itself
The 1877 compromise trades federal troops for the presidency, and the region begins writing Black citizens out of political life
Quick facts
- Key event
- Withdrawal of federal troops from the South
- Legal setback
- Civil Rights Cases of 1883
- Result
- Southern states began the Redemption-era rollback of Black political rights
What happened
Reconstruction, the postwar effort to rebuild the South and guarantee Black Americans equal citizenship under the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, ended in 1877 after the disputed Hayes-Tilden presidential election was resolved by withdrawing the last federal troops from Southern statehouses. The National Park Service's Civil Rights subject page describes how equal rights protections collapsed in the years that followed through legislative and judicial reversal: the Civil Rights Cases of 1883 gutted the Civil Rights Act of 1875, and state after state passed laws stripping Black citizens of the vote and public office they had held during Reconstruction. Former Confederate states entered what historians call the Redemption period, in which white Democratic governments systematically rolled back Black political power gained after emancipation.
Why it matters
The end of Reconstruction removed the federal enforcement that had made Black citizenship real in the South. Every later chapter of the movement, from Plessy through the Civil Rights Act, was an attempt to force the federal government back into that enforcement role it abandoned in 1877.
How we know
The National Park Service's Reconstruction and Repression history page traces the legal chain from the 1875 Civil Rights Act's passage through its gutting by the Supreme Court in 1883 and the subsequent Plessy decision, drawing on the same record of federal statutes and court rulings historians use to date Redemption.
Sources
- National Archives. The Great Migration (1910-1970) · Primary source (author-declared)archives.gov · Cited as a "primary" source (no stronger domain match).
- National Park Service. Reconstruction and Repression, 1865-1900 · Primary source (author-declared)nps.gov · Cited as a "primary" source (no stronger domain match). · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
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Related timelines
- The American Civil War → · The unfinished business of emancipation: Reconstruction's collapse is the hinge between the Civil War's end and the Jim Crow system this movement had to dismantle.