Summary

Although Congress amended the U.S. Constitution and deployed the U.S. army in support of its Reconstruction policies, none of the so-called Radical Republican bi-racial state governments that Congress helped bring into being after 1867 lasted beyond 1877. White reaction throughout the South entrenched the Democratic party in that region for generations to come and prepared the way for racial segregation. Northern acquiescence in the failure of Reconstruction policy culminated in 1896, when the U.S. Supreme Court sanctioned the legality of segregation.