On This Day: Compromise of 1877 "effectively voided" Civil War Union victory, except ... - Mar. 2, 1877
(edited from article)
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A contested presidential election in 1876 produced a devastating compromise
by Richard Kreitner
In a literally smoke-filled room at Wormley’s Hotel in Washington, party bigwigs agreed to a now-infamous compromise: Democratic submission to Hayes’s inauguration in exchange for the withdrawal of federal troops from the last Republican redoubts in the South (Louisiana and South Carolina, where they were propping up besieged governors). The deal brought to a symbolic close the 15-year effort to enforce the Constitution in the South.
The essence of the “devil’s compromise,” as some Black Americans called the deal, was a national recommitment to white supremacy, the oldest and strongest union bond of all.
The compromise of 1877 effectively voided the Union victory in the Civil War — except for the abolition of slavery, and even then, the system that replaced it often closely resembled actual bondage. Military withdrawal brought lynchings, voter suppression and segregation. Southern Blacks became ensnared in what historian Eric Foner, in his landmark history of Reconstruction, calls “a seamless web of oppression, whose interwoven economic, political, and social strands all reinforced one another.” That web, in a sense, was the Union itself.
The truly terrifying legacy of the 1876 electoral standoff isn’t only how close the crisis came to triggering a new outbreak of catastrophic violence but the solution American politicians came up with to avoid it: to avert another constitutional breakdown and resort to arms, the greatest advances for liberty and equality in human history were all but repealed. A renewal of the founding bargain — Northern silence in exchange for Southern allegiance — endured and underwrote America’s rise as a world power.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/09/11/election-our-past-that-blares-warning-2020/
(edited from Wikipedia)
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1876 United States presidential election
The 1876 United States presidential election was the 23rd quadrennial presidential election, held on Tuesday, November 7, 1876. Incumbent Republican president Ulysses S. Grant declined to run for a third term, so the party chose Rutherford B. Hayes, the governor of Ohio, as its nominee. The Democratic Party nominated New York governor Samuel J. Tilden as their nominee.
It was one of the most contentious presidential elections in American history. Its resolution involved negotiations between the Republicans and Democrats, resulting in the Compromise of 1877, and on March 2, 1877, the counting of electoral votes by the House and Senate occurred, confirming Hayes as president. It was the second of five U.S. presidential elections in which the winner did not win a plurality of the national popular vote. This is the first time it happened since 1824, and the only time that a candidate won an overall majority in the popular vote but did not win the presidency.
The results of the election remain among the most disputed ever. Although it is not disputed that Tilden beat Hayes in the popular vote, there were wide allegations of electoral fraud, election violence, and disfranchisement of (predominantly Republican) black voters. After a first count of votes, Tilden won 184 electoral votes to Hayes's 165 with 20 votes from Florida, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Oregon unresolved.
To address the resulting constitutional crisis, Congress established the Electoral Commission, a majority of which were Republicans, which awarded all twenty votes (and thus the presidency) to Hayes. Some Democratic representatives filibustered the commission's decision, hoping to prevent Hayes's inauguration, but their filibuster was ultimately ended by party leader Samuel J. Randall. The question of who should have been awarded those electoral votes is the source of the continued controversy, and historians attribute Randall's decision to drop the filibuster to the informal Compromise of 1877.
To date, it remains the election that yielded the highest voter turnout of the eligible voting-age population in American history, at 82.6%. Tilden's 50.9% is the largest share of the popular vote received by a candidate who was not elected to the presidency, and his voter enthusiasm index (voter turnout percentage multiplied by vote percentage) is the highest of any presidential candidate in American history. Tilden was also the last person to win a majority of the popular vote until William McKinley in 1896. As of 2024, this marks the only presidential election in which both candidates were sitting governors.
Electoral Commission
An Electoral Commission, consisting of 15 men, was formed on January 29, 1877, to debate about the 20 electoral votes that were in dispute. The Commission consisted of five men from the House and the Senate each, plus five Supreme Court justices. Eight members were Republicans; seven were Democrats. The voter returns accepted by the Commission put Hayes' margin of victory in Oregon at 1,057 votes, Florida at 922 votes, Louisiana at 4,807 votes, and South Carolina at 889 votes; the closest popular vote margin in a decisive state in U.S. history until the presidential election of 2000. In late February, the Commission voted along party lines by a vote of 8 to 7 to award all 20 of the disputed electoral votes to Hayes, thus assuring his electoral victory by a margin of 185–184.
[Groundwork for Jim Crow era]
On March 2, an informal deal was struck to resolve the dispute: the Compromise of 1877. In return for the Democrats' acquiescence in Hayes' election (who agreed to serve only one four-year term as president and not to seek reelection as a provision of the deal), the Republicans agreed to withdraw federal troops from the South, ending Reconstruction. The Compromise effectively ceded power in the Southern states to the Democratic Redeemers, who went on to pursue their agenda of returning the South to a political economy resembling that of its pre-war condition, including the disenfranchisement of black voters and setting the groundwork for what would be known as the Jim Crow era.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1876_United_States_presidential_election
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_presidential_elections_in_which_the_winner_lost_the_popular_vote
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