History of the United States I / Unit 17 USH1 2433 review, 2 to 3 minutes
The Counterrevolution
The idea
The last synthesis is the hardest and the course has already stated it once, at Unit 16 entry 2293. Reconstruction was not overthrown by its own failure. It was overthrown. Between the middle eighteen sixties and eighteen seventy-seven White southerners conducted a campaign of organised violence and political recapture that the anchor calls a sometimes violent, generally successful Reconstruction counterrevolution. The Klan and its successors killed a sitting congressman and three state legislators, whipped Abram Colby for refusing to give up his seat, and rode masked into communities to make voting dangerous. Democrats recaptured Texas in eighteen seventy-three, Alabama and Arkansas in seventy-four, and the national House that same year. The Compromise of eighteen seventy-seven withdrew the last federal troops, and every remaining state fell. Three constitutional amendments and a decade of federal enforcement were reversed without a single one of them being repealed. That is the fact to carry out of this course.
In practice
Rights written into the Constitution in five years and made unenforceable within twelve, without a single word of the three amendments being changed or repealed.
Where people slip
This was checked against both witnesses before it was taught, and it is the most contested interpretation in the course. Two guards against overstating it. First, the corruption was real, and Unit 16 entry 2293 concedes it, because an account that denies the concession invites disbelief in everything else. Second, the counterrevolution was not only violence. It ran through elections, courts and Congress, and the machinery Unit 16 entry 2299 describes worked because grand juries were staffed by the men who did the whipping. The rights survived on paper and had to be won again in the century this exam does not cover.
Your place on the trail
Every lesson rests on earlier ones and opens later ones. Tap any to jump.
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