<P> The Radicals' reconstruction plans took effect in 1867 under the supervision of the U.S. Army, allowing a Republican coalition of Freedmen, Scalawags (sympathetic local whites), and Carpetbaggers (recent arrivals from the North), to take control of Southern state governments . They ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, giving enormous new powers to the federal courts to deal with justice at the state level . These state governments borrowed heavily to build railroads and public schools, increasing taxation rates . The backlash of increasingly fierce opposition to these policies drove most of the Scalawags out of the Republican Party and into the Democratic Party . President Ulysses S. Grant enforced civil rights protections for African - Americans that were being challenged in South Carolina, Mississippi, and Louisiana . The Fifteenth Amendment was ratified in 1870 giving African - Americans the right to vote in American elections . </P> <P> U.S. Representative Stevens was one of the major policymakers regarding Reconstruction, and obtained a House vote of impeachment against President Andrew Johnson . Hans Trefousse, his leading biographer, concludes that Stevens "was one of the most influential representatives ever to serve in Congress . (He dominated) the House with his wit, knowledge of parliamentary law, and sheer willpower, even though he was often unable to prevail ." </P> <P> Reconstruction ended at different times in each state, the last in 1877, when Republican Rutherford B. Hayes won the contentious presidential election of 1876 over his opponent, Samuel J. Tilden . To deal with disputed electoral votes, Congress set up an Electoral Commission . It awarded the disputed votes to Hayes . The white South accepted the "Compromise of 1877" knowing that Hayes proposed to end Army control over the remaining three state governments in Republican hands . White Northerners accepted that the Civil War was over and that Southern whites posed no threat to the nation . </P> <P> The end of Reconstruction marked the end of the brief period of civil rights and civil liberties for African Americans in the South, where most lived . Reconstruction caused permanent resentment, distrust, and cynicism among white Southerners toward the federal government, and helped create the "Solid South," which typically voted for the (then -) socially conservative Democrats for all local, state, and national offices . White supremacists created a segregated society through "Jim Crow Laws" that made blacks second - class citizens with very little political power or public voice . The white elites (called the "Redeemers"--the southern wing of the "Bourbon Democrats") were in firm political and economic control of the south until the rise of the Populist movement in the 1890s . Local law enforcement was weak in rural areas, allowing outraged mobs to use lynching to redress alleged - but - often - unproven crimes charged to blacks . </P>

Which action marked the end of reconstruction in the united states