onfederate officers and government officials from voting.This period of Radical Reconstruction did not bring much change in the South. Although blacks began to participate in political life, they met tremendous hostility. Some Southern whites adopted a policy of terror to keep the freedmen from becoming too independent. Because blacks had no jobs or land they became sharecroppers in a kind of economic slavery.Grant won election in 1868, and Congress became free to follow its Radical Reconstruction policies. It successfully proposed the Fourteenth and the Fifteenth Amendments. However, a major depression occurred in 1873. In addition, public attention was diverted by the graft and corruption in President Grant’s cabinet. Corruption in the Grant administration weakened the political strength of the Republican Party. In addition, by the early 1870s, all but a handful former Confederates could vote again. Most of these white southern males now voted Democratic in reaction to Radical Republican Reconstruction. For most of the next century, the Democratic party would dominate voting in the South, giving rise to the term solid South. The emergence of the solid South gave the Democrats greater power in politics at the national level. In 1876, Democrats nominated Tilden, the governor of New York, to run for President against Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, the governor of Ohio. It was a disputed election. Politicians and businessmen worked out a deal, and Republican Hayes was declared the winner. In the compromise of 1877, Democrats agreed to go along with the commission’s decision in returns for promises by Hayes to withdraw federal troops from the South, thus ending Reconstruction; name a southerner to his cabinet; and support federal spending on internal improvements in the South. Thus, Southerners assumed full control. During the next twenty years, they took steps to stop blacks from voting. They also introduced a...
