Reconstruction, the period in American history that followed the Civil War, was an era filled with great hope and expectations, but it proved far too short to ensure a successful transition from bondage to free labor for the almost 4 million black human beings who’d been born into slavery in the U.S. During Reconstruction, the U.S. government maintained an active presence in the former Confederate states to protect the rights of the newly freed slaves and to help them, however incompletely, on the path to becoming full citizens. A little more than a decade later, the era came to an end when the contested presidential election of 1876 was resolved by trading the electoral votes of South Carolina, Louisiana and Florida for the removal of federal troops from the last Southern statehouses. ...He goes on to briefl describe the African-American resistance to the long aftermath of Reconstruction and the developing ideas, attitudes, and practices of white racism and white supremacy that evolved at the same time.
By 1877, in a climate of economic crisis, the “cost” of protecting the freedoms of African Americans became a price the American government was no longer willing to pay. The long rollback began in earnest: the period of retrenchment, voter suppression, Jim Crow segregation and quasi re-enslavement that was called by white Southerners, ironically, “Redemption.”...
What confounds me is how much longer the rollback of Reconstruction was than Reconstruction itself, how dogged was the determination of the “Redeemed South” to obliterate any trace of the gains made by freed people. [my emphasis]
At the end of his book The Era of Reconstruction 18685-1877 (1966), Kenneth Stampp explains that the denial of rights to African-Americans took place without formally changing the basic Constitutional law enshrined in the 14th and 15th Amendments. This required massive deceit and elaborate pretenses. It could now only be done "by extralegal coercion or by some devious subterfuge." In imposing racial segregation, the majority whites relied on "the spurious argument that this did not in fact deprive them of the equal protection of the law."
This kind of massive pretence on the part of white society in itself had long-lasting consequences. Today, it's common for American conservatives to claim that whites are massively discriminated against in the US today on the basis of race. It's ridiculous, of course. But cynical white nationalists that actively promote the idea are building on a long history of white self-deception on matters of race. But noting that it is self-deception does not excuse it or make it sympathetic.
But Stampp makes an important point that changing Constitutional law with the 14th and 15th Amendments created both a legal structure and officially reconized standards of democracy and values that had a real effect. In some ways, his closing words on that subject sound perhaps a bit cavalierly optimistic. But the book was published in 1966, a period in which the civil rights movement was bringing very dramatic changes in the US:
For a time, of course the denial of equality was as effective one way as the other [i.e., de jure or de facto, officially or unofficially]; but when it was sanctioned by the laws of the [Andrew] Johnson governments [during the early years of Reconstruction] and approved by the federal government, there was no hope. When, however, state-imposed discrimination was, in effect, an evasion of the supreme law of the land, the odds, in the long run, were on the side of the Negro.
The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments ... make the blunders of that era, tragic though they were, dwindle into insignificance. For if it was worth four years of civil war to save the Union, it was worth a few years of radical resconstruction to give the American Negro the ultimate promise of equal civil and political rights. [my emphasis]
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