Lesson 2: Resistance and Collapse

White Southerners fought back against these changes. Southern state governments passed Black Codes, laws designed to control the labor and behavior of freed people, essentially trying to restore slavery in all but name.

When the law failed to stop Black progress, some turned to violence. The Ku Klux Klan (KKK) was a terrorist organization that used intimidation, beatings, and murder to stop African Americans from voting. Their goal was to reestablish White Supremacy by destroying the Republican Party in the South.

Although African Americans were legally free, they lacked the one thing needed for true independence: land. Most plantation land was returned to white owners. Former slaves were forced into a system called Sharecropping, where they rented land by paying with a portion of their crop.

White landowners often manipulated the accounts, ensuring that sharecroppers always owed more than they earned. This created a Cycle of Debt that tied Black farmers to the land and trapped them in poverty for generations, functioning as a new form of economic bondage.

By 1876, Northern support for Reconstruction was fading. The presidential election that year ended in a dispute between Republican Rutherford B. Hayes and Democrat Samuel Tilden. To resolve it, politicians made a secret deal known as the Compromise of 1877.

Democrats agreed to let Hayes become president. In exchange, Hayes agreed to withdraw all remaining Federal Troops from the South. This deal effectively ended Reconstruction, leaving African Americans in the South without federal protection and allowing white Democrats to regain total control.