Beyond 1877: Rethinking Postbellum Republican Party Politics and Plotting New Endpoints for the Long Reconstruction

Abstract: This roundtable explores the ongoing debate over how Civil War–era historians frame Reconstruction's endpoint. More than a picayune debate over periodization, the effort to establish a new story about the significance of the Rutherford B. Hayes election forces historians to reconsider long-held premises about national reunion and sectional reconciliation. Challenging the idea of the Compromise of 1877 as a terminus for the era, these scholars turn their attention to the role of the federal courts in hollowing out the period's civil rights laws and the transformations within the Republican Party that shaped the road to disfranchisement. Most importantly, the roundtable adds more texture to the growing "long Reconstruction" historiography. In so doing, the scholars on this roundtable offer a more complex history of the late nineteenth-century United States and a more contingent road to the Jim Crow era.