What groups were involved in the end of Reconstruction?

Late in 1865, just after the United States Civil War ended, the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) was founded. The Klan, a secret organization that used terror tactics to target newly freed African Americans, attracted defeated Confederates who resented the changes of Reconstruction. Under the cloak of darkness and in disguise, the KKK worked to enforce white supremacy as the political and social order of the South.

The end of the Civil War brought freedom to enslaved African Americans in the former Confederacy. The 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution, as well as federal laws introduced during the years of Reconstruction (1866–1877), were intended to protect the civil rights of freed people. However, when they tried to exercise their new rights, they encountered intimidation and violence, much of it organized by the Klan.

The votes of formerly enslaved men helped give the Republican Party control of the Mississippi state legislature, which made Hiram Rhodes Revels the first African American in the United States Senate.

In 1870, South Carolina directly elected Joseph Rainey, another African American, to the U.S. House of Representatives. The Klan reacted with terrorizing night rides to the homes of black voters.

Throughout the South, lynching and intimidation were prevalent. The KKK used secrecy, intimidation, violence, and murder to prevent formerly enslaved African-American men from voting. Black officeholders and their supporters were especially targeted.

In 1871, during the presidency of Ulysses S. Grant, anti-Klan laws were passed allowing the president to declare martial law. Grant did not use these powers to the full extent of the law, but some state militias did break up Klan chapters. Nine South Carolina counties were placed under martial law and arrests followed.

However, after Reconstruction ended in 1877, state legislatures were able to put in place Jim Crow laws that ensured white superiority and segregation. Black voters were intimidated or simply blocked from registering and voting. The new laws placed almost insurmountable obstacles in the way of voting. The early Klan disbanded in the 1870s, partly because of federal laws but also because its goals had been met. The Klan would be revived in the early 20th century with its falsely heroic portrayal in The Birth of a Nation film. The influx of Catholic and Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe offered a new target for the Klan's prejudice.

White supremacy is the belief that white people are superior to others because of their race. Prior to the Civil War, racism and white supremacy had been common attitudes in both the North and the South. After the Emancipation Proclamation, when Union troops began to fight for the abolishment of slavery, Northern attitudes shifted slightly, and many felt that blacks deserved equal legal rights and equal protection, even if they were not considered socially equal.

In the South, however, white supremacists did not believe blacks should have any such rights. During Reconstruction, white supremacists formed political and social groups to promote whites and oppress blacks, and to enact laws that codified inequality. The Ku Klux Klan (founded in 1865) and the Knights of the White Camellia (1867) were secret groups, while members of the White League (1874) and the Red Shirts (1875) were publicly known. All four groups used violence to intimidate blacks and Republican voters. Their efforts succeeded, and with the end of Reconstruction in 1877, white supremacy became the reality of the South.

Q&A: Southern Violence During Reconstruction
Historians describe the violent conditions that prevailed in the American South after the Civil War, as freed slaves and their former masters struggled to develop and control new social, political, and economic relationships.

What caused violence in the South after the war?

Eric Foner, Historian: Violence is endemic in the South, from the end of the Civil War onwards. There's sporadic local violence in 1865-65: contract disputes, disputes over etiquette. A black guy doesn't tip his hat to a white and suddenly people are shooting each other. People refuse to get off the sidewalk to let someone else pass. All sorts of local incidents produce amazing outbreaks of violence. The Freedman's Bureau in Texas has a register of murders with over a thousand in 1865-66 -- and they try to give the reason, you know. "Black man didn't tip his hat so I shot him." Things like that. And this is a sign of the instability of the whole racial system, and the fact that people are claiming new rights and others are resisting that.

Then, with the radical Reconstruction, you get political violence... You get organized groups -- the Ku Klux Klan and others, like the White League in Louisiana, the Knights of the White Camelia... whose purpose is to obstruct and destroy Reconstruction government, to assassinate or intimidate black and white Republican officials, to use violence to prevent people from voting. And this is quite widespread throughout the South. It's not a central organization. It's local groups all over the place. But they have the common goal of restoring white supremacy -- politically speaking, but also in many other areas. Blacks who get into contract disputes with their employers are often victims of the Klan. School teachers are victims of the Klan, people like that. In other words, they're trying to use violence to restore a system of white supremacy that's been disrupted by the coming of Reconstruction.

What kinds of violent things were happening ?

David Bligh, Historiant: [The Ku Klux Klan] would take people out of their houses or their cabins in the dark of the night, strip them out in a road, make them run down the road, make them sometimes lie on a rock where they would be whipped, where men would line up to whip them. Sometimes they would burn parts of their bodies.

These were sadistic tortures, the intention of which was -- we know this from testimony -- to stop these people from engaging in politics, to stop these people from trying to be independent economic actors, to stop these people from trying to get educated, from trying to be citizens.

The basic goal of the Ku Klux Klan was not this kind of sadism. It wasn't even murder. It was to put black people back into their place as the labor force of the South, and not much beyond, and to drive out of business the political force, the Republican Party, that was trying to take them to higher places.

...This is a part of American history that isn't easy to face. It tells us that we had a moment in our history when our politics broke down, our society broke down, our police power broke down; the government wasn't functioning sufficiently enough to protect one group of citizens from another who simply engaged in wanton vigilante violence of the worst kind. We don't like to face that. We don't even want to know about it. We like to believe we are a society of security and progress and improvement. Reconstruction makes us face an era when we were something else.

Who did the violence target?

Clarence Walker, Historian: The violence in the South... was directed at white Southern Republicans. It was directed at black people. It was directed even at people who were not ostensibly political... this was a war of terror, aimed at not only the suppression of black voters and black politicos, but also at whites deemed to be "race traitors."

In the South, any association with the Republican Party became a mark of social pariah-ness, to such a degree that people were terrified, because you had horrendous acts of violence against these Southern white Republicans: people being shot and lynched, and people having their homes burned...

I think we have to understand that the South was not monolithic, in some ways, about the process of Reconstruction governments; that there had been some white Southerners who had been active participants in this, but they were to pay now a terrible price as the federal government relaxed restraints upon other elements in Southern society.

Was there retaliatory violence against whites?

Dana Nelson, Historian: There was a growing awareness among the whites of the possibility that there could be an organized military resistance to their attempt to dominate the workers. They were living in counties where they were seriously outnumbered, at the polls and in their neighborhoods, by African Americans... [Fan Butler is] always being warned by friends in the North about the dangers, and she does understand there could be an insurrection, and for that reason she sleeps every night with a pistol by her pillow.

But, she says, she has enough confidence in the loyalty of the people who work for her that she really believes that if there was an insurrection, someone would tip her off and she would be able to get out of the way before she came to any harm. So she professes never to be seriously worried by this.

What group ended Reconstruction?

What groups were involved in the Reconstruction?

Which group had the biggest influence during Reconstruction?

What finally led to the end of Reconstruction?