II. Constitutional Retreat: Dismantling Reconstruction

The constitutional promises of Reconstruction did not collapse because they were unworkable. They collapsed because the federal government chose to stop enforcing them.

As Northern political support for Reconstruction faded, so did the federal government's commitment to protecting Black citizenship. The Compromise of 1877 and the withdrawal of federal troops from the South marked more than the end of military occupation. They marked the beginning of a new constitutional era in which the federal government increasingly abandoned its responsibility to protect the rights it had so recently guaranteed.

The retreat was both political and judicial. Congress became less willing to confront white resistance, while the federal courts increasingly interpreted the Reconstruction Amendments in ways that limited federal authority and restored broad power to the states. The Reconstruction Amendments remained part of the Constitution, but federal institutions steadily reduced their practical force.

Returning authority over race to the states had predictable consequences. Southern legislatures soon began constructing the legal framework that became known as Jim Crow. Elsewhere, states and local communities used different legal and political tools to preserve racial hierarchy. Exclusion laws, sundown ordinances, restrictive housing practices, employment discrimination, and racial violence helped maintain white communities and white political power far beyond the former Confederacy. Oregon's history of excluding Black residents reminds us that preserving racial hierarchy was a national project, even though its legal forms differed from region to region.

The methods varied. The objective did not. Across the United States, law increasingly protected white power while limiting the rights, opportunities, and freedom of Black Americans and other people of color.

Reconstruction was not repealed. It was hollowed out. That constitutional retreat created the legal and political conditions that allowed American law to reconstruct and strengthen racial hierarchy over the next half century.