U.S. History / Unit 4: Sectionalism, Civil War and Reconstruction
4.6 The End of Reconstruction
Notes
By the 1870s, Northern support faded and white Southern Democrats regained power.
- Sharecropping: landowners let families farm land for a share of the crop. Debt often trapped sharecroppers in poverty.
- The Ku Klux Klan and similar groups used violence and terror to stop Black Americans from voting.
- An economic depression (Panic of 1873) and scandals turned Northern attention away from the South.
- Compromise of 1877: Republican Rutherford B. Hayes became president after a disputed election, and federal troops left the South.
- Afterward, Southern states passed Jim Crow laws enforcing segregation and used poll taxes, literacy tests and grandfather clauses to block Black voting.
- ***Plessy v. Ferguson* (1896) upheld segregation as "separate but equal."**
Practice
The Compromise of 1877 ended Reconstruction by:
With troops gone, Southern Democrats took full control of state governments.
A Black farmer in 1880 rents land and pays the owner half his cotton crop each year, but keeps falling into debt for seeds and tools. This system is:
Sharecropping often trapped families in a cycle of debt.
Which Supreme Court case upheld racial segregation under the idea of "separate but equal"?
The 1896 ruling stood until Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.
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