The term Solid South refers to the political dominance of the Democratic Party in the states of the former Confederacy. During the Reconstruction period, conservative, white-supremacy, Democratic governments gradually replaced the Radical Republican governments set up under the First Reconstruction Act (1867). Virginia and Tennessee were “redeemed,” as the Democrats put it, in 1869, North Carolina in 1870, Georgia in 1871, Texas in 1873, Alabama and Arkansas in 1874, Mississippi in 1875 after a most violent election, and Florida, South Carolina, and Louisiana in 1877. The triumph of the Democratic Party in the South can be ascribed to a combination of amnesty that enfranchised former Confederates, intimidation of black voters who were invariably Republican, and racial politics that identified the Republican Party with African Americans and thus united the white race in its opposition. The final withdrawal of federal troops supporting Republican governments in South Carolina and Louisiana in 1877 by President Rutherford B. Hayes was foreordained by Democratic control of the House of Representatives and with it army appropriations, by the preoccupation of the North with the problems of a severe economic depression, and more fundamentally by the North’s apathy over the civil rights of blacks. After 1877 the former Confederate states sent practically solid Democratic congressional delegations to Washington and until 1928 consistently supported Democratic presidential candidates.
Further reading: William Gillette, Retreat from Reconstruction, 1869-1879 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979); J. Morgan Kousser, The Shaping of
Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party South, 1880-1910 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1974); Michael Perman, Struggle for Mastery: Disfranchisement in the South, 1888-1908 (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2001); C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 1877-1913 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951).
—Phillip Papas
World History
