How Democracy Died: Race, Elections, and The Failure of the First Reconstruction

The end of Reconstruction gave rise to nearly a century of subnational authoritarian rule in the American South. The vast majority of Black Americans were disfranchised and the white supremacist-aligned Democratic Party consolidated political control through most of the South. The rapid rise and durability of the one-party South highlights the vulnerabilities of a federal election system which cedes most power to states and local units of government as agents of election administration. In this dissertation, I argue that much of Reconstruction's failure and the nature of the political system that rose to take its place can be explained within the context of American electoral institutions. I explore the effectiveness of the federal government's occupation of the South insofar as it was able to secure fair and free elections---I then demonstrate that the withdrawal of federal troops accelerated Reconstruction's collapse. I next show how race guided disfranchisers in their work to establish a system of subnational authoritarianism within the confines of a federal democracy. Finally, to understand how a political movement motivated by the disfranchisement of Black voters transitioned into conservative Jim Crow rule, I chronicle how the conflict between disfranchisers and the bi-racial coalitions of Blacks, Republicans, and other Unionists reconfigured into an intra-Democratic and intra-white conflict, pitting conservatives and populists against one another within the party. In particular, I focus on how white conservatives used their geographic representational advantage to grow their political power and consolidate control to disproportionate strength throughout the South.