Here we are in 2010 heading into another contentious election. One of the most contentious of all was the the presidental election of 1876. In that election the New York Democrat, Samuel J. Tilden, received more votes than Ohio Republican, Rutherford B. Hayes in the popular vote, and had 184 electoral votes to Hayes’ 165 with 20 votes – Florida, Louisiana and South Carolina – uncounted. Tilden, then, needed only one more vote to be declared the victor. Each party claimed its candidate had won in those 3 states, while in Oregon one elector was declared illegal and replaced.
After a bitter legal and political battle, those 20 disputed electoral votes were ultimately awarded to Hayes, giving him the presidency. Republicans, however, refused to accept the result. They accused the Democrats of using physical intimidation and bribery to discourage African Americans from voting in the South (unlike today, northern states were heavily Republican; southern states predominately Democratic).
At a raucous meeting in February of 1877 in Washington, D.C., the Southern leaders agreed to allow the Republican candidate, Hayes, to take office on the provision that the new president and congressional leadership agreed in turn to withdraw the last federal occupation troops and officials from the South and let the defeated, Southern leadership run their states.
Former Confederate state governments were then free to pass any laws that did not overtly challenge the authority of the federal government or “outrage the elastic conscience of a national majority.” So long as they made no attempt to secede or reinstitute slavery, southerners were free to build monuments to the Confederate soldier in every county seat, romanticize the “Lost Cause”, and deny the rights of citizenship to anyone with a visible appearance of being an African descendant.
Under this so-called Compromise of 1877, the national government would no longer intervene in Southern affairs, thus permitting the imposition of racial segregation and the disfranchisement of black voters. When the federal troops were withdrawn, the Republican governments in Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina collapsed, bringing Reconstruction to a formal end.
The agreement also finally ended the Civil War. That it sold out the recently freed slaves is beyond question. Many historians feel the reality of the situation i.e. forcing the inhabitants of the 11 Confederate states to remain part of the country after defeating them in a conflict that took 600,000 lives without governing them by martial law, made what followed unavoidable.
Among the reasons the North had fought the war and imposed Reconstruction were to save the Union, abolish slavery, and, for many, to bring about racial equality. The first two goals were achieved and soon accepted (however grudgingly) by the South. The third was bargained away for most of another century.
With southerners and northerners fighting on the same side in the two great wars that followed in 1917 and 1941, the solidity of the Union was reestablished and institutionalized inequality finally become such a widely recognized contradiction to American and Constitutional values that its days were clearly numbered.
Arnie Silverman
