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1865–1877
A Short-Lived Political Revolution
of the era, more than 280 blacks were killed, including 50 who had surrendered. The 345
Colfax Massacre demonstrated the limits of armed black self-defense and the lengths
to which whites would go to secure white dominance. A similar white attack occurred
in 1876 in Hamburg, South Carolina, where skirmishes between black militia, armed
by the state, and whites, acting on their own authority, escalated into a shoot-out. Six
black men died at the hands of the white mob. The Hamburg Massacre routed local
black political authority and strengthened white resolve to “redeem” South Carolina.
In the end, the Republican Party, the federal government, and northern whites all
accepted the return of white ex-Confederates to political and economic power. With
the death of Thaddeus Stevens in 1868 and Charles Sumner in 1874, blacks lost their
most effective spokesmen in Congress. Growing numbers of Republicans had wearied
of the party’s crusade on behalf of blacks and were happy to turn what they called the
“Negro problem” over to southern whites, who were presumed to know best how to
handle it. Republicans were confident that the Fifteenth Amendment had secured
their black voting base in the South. As the party gathered strength in the Midwest and
West, recruiting black Republicans — and securing a southern base for the Republican
Party — became less important to the party. Instead, it turned its attention to eco-
nomic issues, such as support for railroads and industry. Especially after the panic of
1873 set off a deep four-year depression, black Republicans in the South, and black
civil rights in general, became expendable.
One indication of the federal government’s abandonment of the freedpeople was
its failure to back the Freedman’s Savings and Trust Company, which collapsed during
the depression. Chartered by Congress in 1865 to promote thrift and savings among
freedpeople, it had many small savings accounts averaging less than $50 each. Its last
president was Frederick Douglass, who deposited $10,000 of his own money to bol-
ster the institution. When the bank failed in 1874, thousands of African Americans
lost all they had. Eventually, half of the account holders received reimbursements of
about 60 percent of their deposits. The other half received nothing.
By 1877, southern whites had retaken political control of all the southern states.
That same year, in a political deal that resolved the disputed 1876 presidential election
between the Democrat Samuel Tilden and the Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, Black
Reconstruction officially ended. In return for a Hayes victory, Republicans agreed
to remove federal troops from the South. In April 1877, when the troops withdrew,
southern blacks were left without federal protection.
The U.S. Supreme Court further undermined black civil rights. In the 1873
Slaughterhouse Cases, the Court, distinguishing between national citizenship and state
citizenship, ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed only a narrow class of
national citizenship rights and did not encompass the array of civil rights pertaining
to state citizenship. A decade later, in the Civil Rights Cases (1883), the Court over-
turned the Civil Rights Act of 1875, declaring that Congress did not have the author-
ity to protect against the discriminatory conduct of individuals and private groups. As
a result, private companies and businesses, such as hotels, restaurants, and theaters,

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