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Unit The Reconstruction Era 3-Week Unit
A picture of one hand holding down another hand on top of a gun and a pile of papers
Lesson

Political Violence and the Overthrow of Reconstruction

Students learn about the period of violence in the South from 1873-1876 and examine its role in influencing elections and ending Republican control of Southern state governments.

Duration

One 50-min class period

Subject

  • History
  • Social Studies

Grade

9–12

Language

English — US

Published

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About This Lesson

In previous lessons, students learned about challenges to the achievements of Radical Reconstruction, including the first wave of violent backlash in Southern states and the factors that led many Northerners to turn against federal policies that protected freedpeople. In this lesson, students will confront a new, more decisive period of violence that spread across the South between 1873 and 1876. Students will reflect on the factors that led to the success of this violence in precipitating the defeat of Republican governments in the former Confederacy, and they will consider the choices available to individual citizens and government officials who did not support this campaign of violence and intimidation.

Essential Question

  • What can we learn from the history of Reconstruction as we work to strengthen democracy today?

Guiding Questions

  • What makes democracy fragile? 
  • What can be done to protect and strengthen democracy?

Learning Objectives

  • Students will know that the “in” groups and “out” groups that result from racism and other socially constructed divisions in society can leave citizens vulnerable to ostracism, intimidation, and violence.
  • Students will understand that violence and intimidation often silence the voices and votes of citizens, on which democracy depends.

Materials

View in Google Drive

Teaching Notes

Before teaching this lesson, please review the following information to help guide your preparation process. 

Election Violence in Mississippi (1875) and A Teacher Describes Violence and Intimidation (1875) in this lesson include the n-word. In these documents, we have chosen to let the word remain as it originally appeared, without any substitution. The dehumanizing power of this term and the ease with which some Americans have used it to describe their fellow human beings is central to understanding the themes of identity and human behavior at the heart of the unit. 

The dehumanizing power and loaded history of the n-word cannot be ignored, nor can the impact it can have on students if not handled sensitively. We advise against speaking this word out loud in the classroom, but since it appears in this lesson, it is necessary to acknowledge it, understand its problematic nature, and set guidelines for students when reading aloud or quoting from the text (e.g., to say “the n-word” when students encounter it spelled out in full in a text). Otherwise, the presence of this word might both harm students and distract them from an open discussion on a particular topic.

In this lesson, students will encounter emotionally challenging content, including depictions of violence. Consider briefly reviewing the class contract with students before beginning the lesson. This will help reinforce the norms you have established and reinforce the classroom as a safe space for students to voice concerns, questions, or emotions that may arise.

In the mid-1870s, paramilitary groups aligned with the Democratic Party carried out a campaign of violence throughout Republican-controlled states in the South that intimidated, threatened, and killed enough Black and Republican voters to enable white supremacist Democrats to regain control of every former Confederate state. These paramilitary groups called themselves “Redeemers” because they claimed that they were bringing about “redemption” for the supposed misrule of Republican and Black officeholders. Because these terms appear so often in the historical record, contemporary historians continue to refer to this wave of violence as the “Redemption” campaign, even though the literal meaning of the term does not reflect contemporary attitudes and interpretations about what happened. When referring to this campaign of racial and political violence, we use quotations around the words “Redemption” and “Redeemer” to indicate this.

Lesson Plan

Activity 1: Provide Context about the End of Reconstruction

Show the rest of the video Violence and Backlash (9:40–16:45). Preview the following questions with students before showing the video:

  • What events shifted people’s priorities about the rights of freedpeople? How did events that began in 1873 and 1874 shift how the federal government made decisions about whose rights and safety it would protect?  
  • Why did violence return after the government “broke the back of the Klan”? How was it different?
  • How does George Lipsitz interpret the meaning of violence during Reconstruction?

Activity 2: Confronting “Redemption” Violence

The goal of the next activity is for students to learn about and respond to individual incidents of violence against freedpeople and white Republicans in the mid-1870s and to begin to understand why this wave of terror was so decisive in ending Republican control of Southern state governments. 

Explain to students that they will now analyze individual reports of violence in Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina in the years 1874 to 1876, and they will consider the effects of this violence on the health of democracy in these states. Give each student one of the following documents:

Explain to students that their task is to read the document they have been assigned and to record the following in their journals:

  • One to three phrases or sentences from the document that capture the essence of the events it describes
  • A brief description of a choice that an individual made during the events described in the document and the consequences of that choice
  • A color that represents how they think the events described in the document impacted the health of democracy (a choice that they will need to be able to explain in the next class period)

Activity 3: Debriefing Redemption Violence

Ask students to work in pairs or small groups to discuss the individual reports of violence they analyzed in the previous activity. Students can share with their classmates the words, phrases, and sentences they identified from their documents, discuss the choices they observed, and then explain the color they chose to represent the event’s impact on the health of democracy. After students have had sufficient time to share their work with each other, you might share the following quotation from historian Michael Perman with the whole group:

Lawless and utterly undemocratic means were employed to secure the desired outcome, which was to win a lawful, democratic election.

Discuss as a class how the documents that students examined support or refute Perman’s claim. Make sure that students use specific evidence from their documents in the discussion.

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Lesson

Political Violence and the Overthrow of Reconstruction

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