By the mid-1870s, Democrats had retaken the South, reseating themselves in southern legislatures by driving blacks and white Unionists away from the polls and employing violence and other unethical tactics to win state elections. Most northerners looked the other way during this period, consumed by their own economic hardships.

In the late 1870s and early 1880s, a conservative Supreme Court also struck down much of the civil rights legislation that Radical Republicans had passed. In the 1873Slaughterhouse Cases, the Court ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment safeguarded a person’s rights only at a federal level, not at a state level (in rulings ten years later, the court further stipulated that the Fourteenth Amendment prohibited racial discrimination only by the U.S. government, not by individuals). In1876, the Court ruled in United States v. Cruikshank that only states and their courts—not the federal government—could prosecute Ku Klux Klan members under the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871.

	Created by hcrosby almost 9 years ago

A Levels History Slide Set on RECONSTRUCTION (1865–1877) Summary of Events, created by hcrosby on 17/08/2015.