Reconstruction Ends and Jim Crow Rises
A disputed election, the withdrawal of federal troops, and the return of white rule
Quick facts
- Trigger
- The disputed 1876 election of Rutherford B. Hayes
- Key act
- Withdrawal of U.S. Army troops from the South
- Result
- Black Codes and Jim Crow segregation laws
- Duration
- Enforced into the mid-20th century
What happened
For a little over a decade after the Civil War, federal power in the South protected the new rights of Black citizens, and Black men voted and held office. It ended in a political bargain. The controversial presidential election of Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876 was resolved through an agreement to remove the remaining U.S. Army units from the former Confederate states. With federal troops gone, Southern states were free to enact discriminatory laws that stripped Black Americans of their civil and voting rights. The result was the re-establishment of Black Codes and the rise of Jim Crow laws, a system of racial segregation and disenfranchisement that used poll taxes, literacy tests, and terror to keep Black Americans from voting booths and to enforce separation of the races.
Why it matters
The end of Reconstruction is one of the great reversals in American history: rights guaranteed by the Constitution in 1868 and 1870 were nullified in practice by 1877, and it took the civil rights movement of the mid-twentieth century, nearly ninety years later, to begin restoring them. Jim Crow shaped the lives of generations of Black Southerners and the geography of American race relations well into living memory.
How we know
The 1877 troop withdrawal and the subsequent spread of segregation and disenfranchisement laws are documented in federal and state records and in the National Park Service's history of the Reconstruction era.
Sources
- National Park Service. About the Reconstruction Era · Reputable sourcehome.nps.gov · The domain "home.nps.gov" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
- National Park Service, African American Heritage. Reconstruction: A State Divided · Reputable sourcenps.gov · The domain "nps.gov" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
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Related timelines
- The Civil Rights Movement → · The Jim Crow system that Reconstruction's collapse produced is what the civil rights movement fought to dismantle; see that timeline for the long struggle against it.