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HIST 119: The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877

Lecture 25 - The "End" of Reconstruction: Disputed Election of 1876, and the "Compromise of 1877". This lecture focuses on the role of white southern terrorist violence in brining about the end of Reconstruction. Professor Blight begins with an account the Colfax Massacre. Colfax, Louisiana was the sight of the largest mass murder in U.S. history, when a white mob killed dozens of African Americans in the April of 1873. Two Supreme Court decisions would do in the judicial realm what the Colfax Massacre had done in the political. On the same day as the Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court offered a narrow reading of the 14th Amendment in the Slaughterhouse cases, signaling a judicial retreat from the radicalism of the early Reconstruction years. The Cruikshank case, two years later, would overturn the convictions of the only three men sentenced for their involvement in Colfax, and marked another step away from reconstruction. Professor Blight concludes with the Panic of 1873 and the seemingly innumerable political scandals of the Grant Administration, suggesting the manner in which these events encouraged northerners to tire of the Reconstruction experiment by the early 1870s. (from oyc.yale.edu)

Lecture 25 - The "End" of Reconstruction

Time Lecture Chapters
[00:00:00] 1. Introduction: The Regression of Revolution
[00:03:46] 2. Southern Reactions to the Fifteenth Amendment
[00:10:46] 3. The Slaughterhouse Cases and Their Impact on the 14th Amendment
[00:18:44] 4. The Colfax Massacre and the Cruikshank Case
[00:31:54] 5. The Panic of 1873 and Scandals within the Grant Administration
[00:44:04] 6. The Ku Klux Klan and Conclusion

References
Lecture 25 - The "End" of Reconstruction: Disputed Election of 1876, and the "Compromise of 1877"
Instructor: Professor David W. Blight. Transcript [html]. Audio [mp3]. Download Video [mov].

Go to the Course Home or watch other lectures:

Lecture 01 - Introductions: Why Does the Civil War Era Have a Hold on American Historical Imagination?
Lecture 02 - Southern Society: Slavery, King Cotton, and Antebellum America's "Peculiar" Region
Lecture 03 - A Southern World View: The Old South and Proslavery Ideology
Lecture 04 - A Northern World View: Yankee Society, Antislavery Ideology and the Abolition Movement
Lecture 05 - Telling a Free Story: Fugitive Slaves and the Underground Railroad in Myth and Reality
Lecture 06 - Expansion and Slavery: Legacies of the Mexican War and the Compromise of 1850
Lecture 07 - "A Hell of a Storm": The Kansas-Nebraska Act and the Birth of the Republican Party, 1854-55
Lecture 08 - Dred Scott, Bleeding Kansas, and the Impending Crisis of the Union, 1855-58
Lecture 09 - John Brown's Holy War: Terrorist or Heroic Revolutionary?
Lecture 10 - The Election of 1860 and the Secession Crisis
Lecture 11 - Slavery and State Rights, Economies and Ways of Life: What Caused the Civil War?
Lecture 12 - "And the War Came," 1861: The Sumter Crisis, Comparative Strategies
Lecture 13 - Terrible Swift Sword: The Period of Confederate Ascendency, 1861-1862
Lecture 14 - Never Call Retreat: Military and Political Turning Points in 1863
Lecture 15 - Lincoln, Leadership, and Race: Emancipation as Policy
Lecture 16 - Days of Jubilee: The Meanings of Emancipation and Total War
Lecture 17 - Homefronts and Battlefronts: "Hard War" and the Social Impact of the Civil War
Lecture 18 - "War So Terrible": Why the Union Won and the Confederacy Lost at Home and Abroad
Lecture 19 - To Appomattox and Beyond: The End of the War and a Search for Meanings
Lecture 20 - Wartime Reconstruction: Imagining the Aftermath and a Second American Republic
Lecture 21 - Andrew Johnson and the Radicals: A Contest over the Meaning of Reconstruction
Lecture 22 - Constitutional Crisis and Impeachment of a President
Lecture 23 - Black Reconstruction in the South: The Freedpeople and the Economics of Land and Labor
Lecture 24 - Retreat from Reconstruction: The Grant Era and Paths to "Southern Redemption"
Lecture 25 - The "End" of Reconstruction: Disputed Election of 1876, and the "Compromise of 1877"
Lecture 26 - Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory
Lecture 27 - Legacies of the Civil War