Election compromise of 1877

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Final result of 1876 election

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Some background on the election and how it ended. At the end of election day, the results were unclear due to three states: South Carolina, Louisiana, and Florida. The legislatures in those states fought hard and declared fraud and invalid ballots giving all three states to Hayes. However, due to a legal mix up in Oregon the election was not over yet. Due to congress receiving conflicting electoral votes in those states they created a commission to declare the winner. This commission was made up of 15 members from congress and the Supreme Court. The votes were partisan with the decision being an 8 to 7 vote to give the remaining electoral votes (20) to Hayes to win 185 to 184.1

Shortly after the election, military troops were removed from southern states. What followed was the disenfranchisement of African Americans across the South eliminating civil, voting, and human rights. The main school of thought behind this is the “Bargain of 1877”, which contemporary sources for years did not give any credibility or serious thought toward until 1951 when Comer Vann Woodward came out with his book, Reunion and Reaction: The Compromise of 1877 and the End of Reconstruction. Thanks to this book, historians have accepted that a bargain or compromise took place. Woodwards thesis of the bargain has been summarized as: “the South settled the issue by trading the presidency for: (1) the federal withdrawal of troops from the three contested southern states; (2) the promise of financial aid for the Texas and Pacific Railroad; (3) appointment of a southerner on Hayes cabinet; (4) and the understanding that the South alone would solve its racial problem.2 This bargain was in large part the democrats abandoning Tilden and giving in to Hayes authority ending the filibuster in congress to allow the electoral votes to be counted.3 This was in exchange for control with the withdrawal of troops from southern states effectively ending reconstruction in the South.  

 

Some influential members of this bargain went on later in their life to reveal some of the aspects and particulars that had not been known to the public previously.4 In 1937, a Democrat, Abram S. Hewitt published his “secret history” of the crisis.5 If Hewitt ever was informed of the negotiations, he did not reveal them in his “secret history.” It has been reported that the full truth like all of history will never be fully known pertaining to the certain events of the great compromise of 1877.6

Footnotes 

  1. Sheila Blackford and President Rutherford B. Hayes, “Disputed Election of 1876,” Miller Center (University of Virginia, 2023), https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/educational-resources/disputed-election-1876.
  2.  James Shenton, in Reconstruction; a Documentary History of the South after the War:1865-1877 (N.Y.: Putnam, 1963), p. 7.
  3. Washington National Republican, February 24, 1877.
  4. New York Tribune , March 30, 1877.
  5. Comer Vann Woodward, Reunion and Reaction: The Compromise of 1877 and the End of Reconstruction (Oxford: Oxford university press, 1991). p. 5
  6.  Henry Watterson, “The Hayes-Tilden Contest for the Presidency, Inside History of a Great Political Crisis,” Century Magazine , 1913, p. 3-4.
Election compromise of 1877