Some dates live on in history. Some live on in glory, like July 4, 1776. Some live on in infamy, like December 7, 1941, or September 11, 2001. History is more than the study of dates, but dates are an important part of history.
Some presidential elections are remembered as more “important” than others. The election of 1860, for example, when Abraham Lincoln was elected on a platform that included limitations (although not the abolition) of slavery. In 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected because of his promise of a “New Deal” for Americans. In 1960 it was John F. Kennedy and his “New Frontier,” and in 1980 it was Ronald Reagan’s “We Can Make America Great Again.” Really -- that was his campaign slogan. I looked it up. In 2008, Barack Obama’s victory signaled a potential new era for the United States, although that dream was quashed in large part by the man who came to office as his successor in as a result of the election 2016. Trump pushed the “birtherism” conspiracy theory that undercut President Obama’s terms in office and poisoned the ground for his potential successor, Hillary Clinton.
The presidential election of 1876 is not often mentioned in the list of important elections, but I think it should be. This was the election that corruptly ended Reconstruction in the South and allowed for the emergence of the toxic Jim Crow era in American History – an era from which the United States has not yet recovered.
Let’s review what happened in this election.
The Civil War had ended with a Union victory in 1865.
The Reconstruction Era in the south – which was actually three Reconstruction eras – had seen an effort to reintegrate southern states from the Confederacy into the United States and to accommodate four million formerly enslaved persons.
Wartime Reconstruction (1863-1865)
Presidential Reconstruction (1865-1867)
Congressional (or Radical) Reconstruction (1867-1877)
Reconstruction had to address four problems:
Bringing the South back into the Union.
Rebuilding the South after its destruction during the war.
Integrating and protecting newly-emancipated black freedmen.
Deciding what branch of government should control the process of Reconstruction.
Without going into enormous detail, it wasn’t until the third phase of Reconstruction – Radical Reconstruction – that things changed dramatically across the South. In the earlier phases of Reconstruction, the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments had passed, and the states of the former Confederacy had been permitted to rejoin the Union by ratifying these amendments and meeting other requirements, such as requiring former high-ranking Confederate government and military officials to take an oath of allegiance. The Amnesty Act of 1872, however, ended all further restrictions on the political or economic activities of former civil and military officials who had been in rebellion.
While many of these prohibitions had still been in place, formerly enslaved persons were elected to office throughout the south. During Reconstruction, 16 African Americans had served in Congress. Hiram Revels from Mississippi was the first freed slave to be elected to the Senate – ironically, to fill the seat that had been held by Jefferson Davis before the war.
If things had been allowed to progress as they had begun, the United States would have moved into a situation of multi-racial democracy after the Civil War, and the country wouldn’t continue to be torn up by racism for the next 150 years. The process wouldn’t have been without its bumps and bruises, that’s for sure, but it would have been progress. However, things weren’t allowed to continue as they had begun, and this is where the 1876 election comes in.
Briefly this is what happened in this election:
Incumbent President Ulysses S. Grant decided not to run for a third term, throwing the nomination process open. James G. Blaine led the field of candidates, but was not able to achieve a majority at the nomination convention. On the seventh ballot, the convention chose Ohio Governor Rutherford B. Hayes as a compromise candidate.
Samuel J. Tilden, governor of New York, easily won the Democratic Party nomination.
The Democrats ran against the corruption of the Grant administration; the Republicans ran against the fact that the Democratic Party was identified with the Confederacy and had caused the Civil War. The Republicans used this phrase: “Not every Democrat was a rebel, but every rebel was a Democrat.” It is important to note that by 1876 both parties were ready to end the reconstruction policies that had dominated the decade since the end of the Civil War.
This election was contentious. Specifically, four states (Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina) submitted a total of 19 electoral votes favoring Tilden, but the tally was marred by accusations of electoral fraud and threats of violence against Republican voters. Votes were also disputed in Oregon.
This is how Wikipedia describes what happened next:
To resolve the issue, Congress passed a law on January 29, 1877, to form a 15-member Electoral Commission to settle the result. Five members were Five members were selected from each house of Congress, and they were joined by five members of the United States Supreme Court, with William M. Evarts serving as counsel for the Republican Party. The majority party in each house named three members and the minority party two members. As the Republicans controlled the Senate and the Democrats controlled the House of Representatives, that yielded five Democratic and five Republican members of the commission. Of the Supreme Court justices, two Republicans and two Democrats were chosen, with the fifth to be selected by those four.
The justices first selected the independent Justice David Davis. According to one historian, "No one, perhaps not even Davis himself, knew which presidential candidate he preferred." Just as the Electoral Commission Bill was passing Congress, the Illinois Legislature elected Davis to the Senate, and Democrats in the legislature believed that they had purchased Davis's support by voting for him. However, they had miscalculated, as Davis promptly excused himself from the commission and resigned as a Justice to take his Senate seat. Since all of the remaining available Justices were Republicans, they had already selected Justice Joseph P. Bradley, who was considered the most impartial remaining member of the court. That selection proved decisive.
Since it was drawing perilously near to Inauguration Day [March 4 at that time], the commission met on January 31. Each of the disputed state election cases (Florida, Louisiana, Oregon, and South Carolina) was respectively submitted to the commission by Congress. Eminent counsel appeared for each side, and there were double sets of returns from every one of the states named.
The commission first decided not to question any returns that were prima facie lawful. Bradley then joined the other seven Republican committee members in a series of 8–7 votes that gave all 20 disputed electoral votes to Hayes, which gave Hayes a 185–184 electoral vote victory. The commission adjourned on March 2. Hayes privately took the oath of office the next day, was publicly sworn into office on March 5, 1877, and was inaugurated without disturbance.
During intense closed-door meetings, Democratic leaders agreed reluctantly to accept Hayes as President in return for the withdrawal of federal troops from the last two Southern states that were still occupied: South Carolina and Louisiana. Republican leaders in return agreed on a number of handouts and entitlements, including federal subsidies for a transcontinental railroad line through the South. Although some of the promises were not kept, particularly the railroad proposal, that was enough for the time being to avert a dangerous standoff. [Emphasis added]
The returns accepted by the Commission put Hayes's margin of victory in South Carolina at 889 votes, the second-closest popular vote margin in a decisive state in U.S. history, after the election of 2000, which was decided by 537 votes in Florida. In 2000, the margin of victory in the Electoral College for George W. Bush was five votes, as opposed to Hayes' one vote.
Upon his defeat, Tilden said, "I can retire to public life with the consciousness that I shall receive from posterity the credit of having been elected to the highest position in the gift of the people, without any of the cares and responsibilities of the office."
Take another look at the paragraph in bold-face type. The Democratic Party, which blamed Lincoln and the Republicans for the Civil War, agreed to accept the election of a Republican (Hayes) if federal troops were withdrawn from the South.
A little more background: The 1867 Military Reconstruction Act had divided the South into five military districts, each of them governed by a general supported by federal troops.
A combination of factors led to the emergence of the Jim Crow era. In the 1870s, Democrats began to muster more political power, as former Confederate soldiers and political leaders regained the power to vote after the 1872 Amnesty Act. It was a movement that gathered energy up until the Compromise of 1877, in the process known as the Redemption. White Democratic Southerners saw themselves as redeeming the South by regaining power. The former slave-holders in the South (and the society they both created and led) wanted to be rid of what they saw as northern intrusion into their domestic affairs. They were willing to cede the presidency to the Republican candidate, Hayes, in exchange for being left alone to manage the situation that had been created by emancipation. The Republican Party didn’t exactly have clean hands in all of this; although the party had (mostly) supported Lincoln as he prosecuted the war, and then had later enacted Reconstruction, they were also ready to move on and leave the South to recover on its own.
The election of 1876 was pivotal in this process, as it signaled the decision by both political parties to allow the southern states to manage the issues associated with the millions of freed slaves. After 1876, neither party was concerned with the plight of African Americans, either in the South or in other parts of the country. The progressives, a political movement that emerged in the 1890s as the United States was going through major economic transformation, didn’t concern themselves with this problem.
We are all familiar with what happened over the next 150 years. The country allowed the vile treatment afforded African Americans to become the norm. Segregation in virtually every aspect of American life was accepted as a fact of life. Periodic efforts to address the problems – most notably, the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s – brought about some change. But the movement had no staying power in the face of white resistance.
In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan acted much as both political parties had acted in 1876. He decided that control over the issues impacting the lives of blacks in the south could now be returned to the states – just like the parties involved in the election of 1876 had decided. He concluded that the 15 years since the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and the 1965 Civil Rights Act had been long enough for the Federal government to focus on these problems – just like the parties in 1876 had decided that 10 years was long enough for them. The modern Republican party has followed the same path as both political parties after the election of 1876, proposing public policy ideas favorable to white elites while allowing the condition of the disadvantaged to be left to the vagaries of whoever happened to be in charge in the various states.
It’s shameful and abhorrent and it didn’t have to be this way.
Another great essay, Karen. Please don't stop writing. At the risk of sounding like a suck-up, I really enjoy your columns. I remember most of it, but you expand that knowledge exponentially. Thank you.
Excellent piece. And right on.