 During Reconstruction, the Ku Klux Klan and others used lynching as a means to control blacks, forcing them to work for planters and preventing them from exercising their right to vote.Federal troops and courts enforcing the Civil Rights Act of 1871 largely broke up the Reconstruction-era Klan.By the end of Reconstruction in 1877, with fraud, intimidation and violence at the polls, white Democrats regained nearly total control of the state legislatures across the South.