Coming a full century after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the Campaign of 1876 demonstrates the ongoing tension between the egalitarian ideal of 1776 and its frustrated application throughout the social and political life of the republic. Reconstruction had been under way for over a decade, but the attempt to restructure politics and political culture in the United States along lines more congruent with the founding principles of liberty and equality continued to encounter sustained resistance. For most of the prior decade, Radical Republicans had pushed Southern Reconstruction as necessary to assure that these principles would take root and hold fast in the former slave states. But such measures required constant effort and resilience against those who would resist the dramatic changes needed to overcome the legacy of slavery that reached back to the colonial period and had itself pushed down its own strong roots, holding firm until the bloody constraint of an actual civil war forcefully dislodged it. Such prolonged and extensive effort often loses energy after a short time, and this was certainly the case for the cause of the Radical Republicans in the mid-1870s.
By 1876, intensified opposition to Reconstruction mounted from social and political forces, North and South, tired of the enthusiasms of reform and anxious to reestablish the traditional social order. From the perspective of the South, the Republican Party represented an oppressive occupation force, a conquering military regime depriving Southern civilization of the dignities of self-government. Even though Reconstruction was losing momentum, Southerners still bristled at the presence of federal troops in three states (South Carolina, Louisiana, and Florida), and the state governments—described in the pejorative as “carpetbag” regimes—that had been installed in the South after the war were deemed fraudulent, Jacobin, opportunistic, and utterly dependent on the presence of federal troops. Indeed, it was evident to many that the only thing that kept the despised Party of Lincoln viable anywhere in the old Confederacy was the federal military. In 1870 and 1871, Congress under the direction of the Radical Republicans passed the Enforcement Acts, promulgated to reinforce the radical governments that had been established in the separate southern states. But working against this, in 1872, the passage of the Amnesty Act granting amnesty to former Confederates enabled the return to politics of many Southern white leaders who could now openly muster their energies to officially oppose Reconstruction policies within their state governments, and to reenter government and influence policy at the federal level. The Civil War was long over, but sectionalism remained strong, and as the parties themselves were closely identified with the sections, residual postbellum enmities between North and South were the same enmities now converted to those held between Republicans and Democrats.
This deep sectional animosity, the immediate legacy of the Civil War, and what was regarded in the South as the bane of Reconstruction, reverberated throughout the Campaign of 1876 and infected any political debate or discussion at the national level. Republican politicians on the stump bluntly reminded the electorate that it was the Democratic Party that had supported slavery, betrayed the Union, and killed Northern sons—culminating in the assassination of the Great Emancipator himself. Campaigning in late September for the Republican candidate, firebrand Robert G. Ingersoll, one of the era’s greatest orators, invoking the spirit of the waved bloody shirt, reiterated Democratic perfidy at a speech delivered before a veterans’ association in Indianapolis:
“Every State that seceded from the Union was a Democratic State,” he declaimed, “Every man that tried to destroy the nation was a Democrat. Every man that shot Union soldiers was a Democrat. . . . Every man that loved slavery better than liberty was a Democrat. The man that assassinated Abraham Lincoln was a Democrat. . . . Every man that wanted the privilege of whipping another man . . . was a Democrat. Every man that raised bloodhounds to pursue human beings was a Democrat. . . . Soldiers, every scar you have . . . was given you by a Democrat. . . . [E]very arm that is lacking, every limb that is gone, is a souvenir of a Democrat. I want you to recollect.” (Ingersoll, Vol. 9)
The continuing dispute, often vituperative and always anguished, over Reconstruction was further darkened by the lingering shadow of “Grantism” (i.e., the public’s reaction to years of maladministration under President Grant, an honest and sincere leader undercut by unscrupulous self-servers), a problem that Grant had already managed to dodge in 1872 but that was now again haunting the party as it moved into the general election season. Even though a series of investigations failed to tie the president directly to any of the scandals, the extent of the corruption did its damage to his party. Finally, the September 18, 1873, failure of Jay Cooke and Company, one of the most respected banking houses in the United States, touched off the Panic of 1873, the harbinger of a three-year depression during which more than ten thousand businesses failed. These three trends—discontent over Reconstruction, disenchantment over Republican corruption, and a troubled economy—created an almost perfect situation providing the Democratic Party with an opportunity to finally make a serious move to recapture the White House.
Within this context, the centennial election was nearly calamitous. The campaign prior to the election was pocked with bitter invective, prevarication, and scandalmongering. The election itself appeared to be an undemocratic fraud. It would seem to many that the only self-evident truth marking the centennial of the Declaration of Independence was that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are ever mocked and occasionally trumped by callous partisan ambition. As the Republican Party held its convention in Cincinnati in June, James Gillespie Blaine of Maine, a former Speaker of the House who was about to move to the Senate and was an increasingly important personage within the Republican Party, and governor and war hero Rutherford B. Hayes of Ohio were the main contenders for the Republican nomination, despite the fact that President Grant had earlier indicated his willingness to break President Washington’s hallowed precedent and accept a third term. Blaine appeared to have early momentum, and he received a famous and ringing endorsement from Ingersoll at the convention.
Many saw in Blaine, who projected a palpable magnetism (he was often referred to as “The Magnetic Man”), a figure of great promise. During the latter half of the Civil War, Blaine, who at that time was a junior member of the House of Representatives, had earned the trust of President Lincoln himself, and as a highly skilled speaker in his own right, Blaine became well known throughout the country for his inspirational oratory in support of Lincoln and on behalf of the Union cause. His rhetorical skills could be overwhelming; in a debate against his most bitter political rival, New York’s Roscoe Conkling, his rebuttal was so withering that Conkling came away feeling publicly humiliated. Blaine was also involved in coauthoring the Fourteenth Amendment and had positioned himself as a moderate on the issue of Reconstruction, as well as a moderate on Republican positions in general. Indeed, Blaine had become one of the principal leaders—perhaps the principal leader—of the “Half Breeds,” one of the two major factions in the Republican Party that had emerged during Reconstruction, the other being the “Stalwarts.” The Half Breeds were so named because their moderate stance on most policies was described by their enemies as only “half Republican,” or “half breed.” The Half Breeds were not moderates when it came to their opposition to political patronage; they were the wing of the party most committed to civil service reform and the end of the “spoils system,” whereas the Stalwarts were well entrenched behind the older practice of patronage. Blaine was without question a brilliant politician, and moving toward the convention, his appeal seemed to push him out in front of the field. And Ingersoll was perhaps his most fervent champion; in a now-famous nominating speech at the 1876 convention, a speech that is still regarded as one of the finest of its kind, the remarkable orator coined Blaine’s most famous nickname, the Plumed Knight:
Like an armed warrior, like a plumed knight, James G. Blaine marched down the halls of the American Congress and threw his shining lances full and fair against the brazen foreheads of every defamer of his country and maligner of its honor. For the Republican Party to desert a gallant man now is worse than if an army should desert their general upon the field of battle. James G. Blaine is now, and has been for years, the bearer of the sacred standard of the Republic. I call it sacred because no human being can stand beneath its folds without becoming, and without remaining, free. (Ingersoll, Vol. 9)
But to his political misfortune, Blaine’s reputation had also suffered owing to a serious public scandal implicating him in unscrupulous railroad deals from which he had allegedly gained considerable personal profit. Indeed, Ingersoll’s encomium celebrating Blaine on the convention floor was in part a defense of his candidate against these allegations. Apparently while serving Congress as the Speaker of the House of Representatives in 1869 (during the Andrew Johnson administration), Blaine had unduly used his weighty influence to pass legislation that would unfairly promote the business interests of the Little Rock & Fort Smith Railroad. In return for this favor, a contractor for the railroad, Warren Fisher Jr., made arrangements for Speaker Blaine to sell railroad securities, thereby allowing Blaine to line his own pockets with a generous commission in railroad bonds. The plan backfired as the value of the bonds plummeted, rendering them almost useless to Blaine. Another financier, Tom Scott, came to the aid of both Blaine and the railroad by purchasing Blaine’s now nearly worthless bonds at a price that would garner a profit. In return for this favor, Speaker Blaine would ensure the passage of legislation that would benefit Scott’s own railroad enterprise, the Texas & Pacific Railroad. A congressional investigation was established at the insistence of House Democrats, who alleged bribery and influence peddling, and the Speaker was now on trial before his colleagues. To the ever-alert cartoonist Thomas Nast, the Plumed Knight was sketched as a “Tattooed Man,” displaying in ink the wages of shady deals, graft, and corruption. The cartoonist’s pen was more perspicuous than Blaine, who seriously underestimated the impact of the scandal on the delegates at the 1876 convention.
The whole affair came to be known as the “Mulligan Letters” scandal after James Mulligan, a Boston bookkeeper (once employed by Blaine’s brother in-law) who became a central figure in the controversy when he had claimed to keep in his possession personal letters of an incriminating nature that would expose the guilt of Blaine and his friends to the investigating committee. In late May, just as Blaine was about to clear his name before the committee (and in so doing, clear his way to the Republican nomination and, quite plausibly, the presidency), Mulligan revealed the existence of the letters and made it known that he was willing to share their contents. Immediately the committee went into recess, and in the interval, as Mulligan would claim, Blaine, in an allegedly desperate attempt to forestall the scandal, visited him at his home and, through a sustained battery of pleading, cajoling, and the promise of political office, tricked Mulligan into handing over the letters (said to number fourteen letters in all) to Blaine on the grounds that they were, after all, his own private and personal property. In Mulligan’s account, Blaine was so distressed that he threatened suicide, although there is no evidence, other than Mulligan’s own claim, that any of this happened. In fact, Blaine denied the entire story, asserting that he had never visited Mulligan’s home; and on the House floor, after reading into the record what he claimed were the actual letters, he turned them over to the investigative committee. Mulligan claimed that the letters produced by Blaine did not account for the entire correspondence, and that other, more damaging letters were withheld by Blaine. Before it could go any further, the investigation stalled, and eventually the House lost its authority to investigate Blaine, as he received an appointment to the U.S. Senate, making him invulnerable to any further House action. Blaine’s friends and political allies were satisfied that he had exonerated himself, but the odor of scandal would nonetheless dog him for the remainder of his political career, beginning with the nominating convention of 1876.
Erupting a few days before the beginning of the Republican convention, the Mulligan Letters scandal had altered the playing field. With the erstwhile Liberal Republicans now back in the party fold, and with suspicions about Blaine nagging at a number of party regulars, the cry for a reform candidate grew more forceful. Given Blaine’s now weakened position, a number of candidates entered the fray; thus Blaine, Hayes, and Conkling were now joined by other viable contenders: Benjamin Bristow of Kentucky, Senator Oliver Morton of Indiana, and Governor John H. Hartranft of Pennsylvania, a former general and Medal of Honor winner who had served in the same army corps with Hayes during the war. Connecticut’s Marshall Jewel, postmaster general, rounded out the field. As secretary of the treasury under President Grant, Bristow had broken yet another scandal, one known as the Whiskey Ring, a fairly elaborate conspiracy involving whiskey distillers and collateral businesses related to whiskey production and distribution, politicians, and government officials who were diverting tax revenues levied on their product to their own private profit. Grant was clear of the scandal and had no knowledge of it; but typically, one of his subordinates, his personal secretary, Orville Babcock, was enmeshed in the conspiracy and was thus indicted; the action infuriated Grant, prompting Bristow to resign as secretary of the treasury and to make his own run at the Republican presidential nomination. (Babcock was eventually acquitted, but it later became, by other means, apparent to Grant that he was in fact involved.) Because of bad blood between Grant and Bristow, his chances at the convention were compromised, given the influence that the president, who was not without a strong loyal following, still held in the party, corruption in his administration notwithstanding.
Even with this large field of challengers and the odor of the railroad scandal, the first ballot went to Blaine, who won 285 of the required 378 votes, with Morton a distant second at 124. Blaine, still a substantial political force, actually gained votes on the next three ballots and seemed to be close to the prize, dropped slightly on the fifth ballot, but then regained enough momentum to have won 308 sixth-ballot votes, just 70 shy of winning the nomination. Through the second through the fifth ballots, Bristow took and held second, peaking at 126 on the fourth, Conkling followed in third place through the fourth ballot, having peaked with 99 on the first, and Hayes and Hartranft exchanged fourth and fifth place throughout the first four ballots, with Hartranft peaking at 71 on the fourth. A deftly managed effort on behalf of Hayes steered the party toward the Ohio reformer, who suddenly leapt into third with 104 fifth-ballot votes, gaining nine more on the sixth to move into second. Between the sixth and seventh ballots, Hayes began to draw support away from other candidates, especially Bristow and Morton, narrowing it to a contest between Blaine and Hayes. On the seventh ballot, Hayes pulled in front, gaining 384 votes to 351 for Blaine. Even though it was Blaine’s highest total, it was now not enough to hold off Hayes, who had what was needed to secure the nomination.
When the contest was over, nearly all the candidates who had received support at the convention, including Blaine (a dejected Conkling being the only exception), voiced a united front for Hayes and his vice presidential nominee, William A. Wheeler of New York, who needed just one ballot to win an easy nomination. Hayes, who was firmly in the Half Breed camp on the issue of civil service reform, vigorously attacked the spoils system, advocated “rigid responsibility” in civil service through extensive, effective reform, and recommended embracing a more conservative Republican platform that had now jettisoned its long commitment to Reconstruction. “Hurrah! For Hayes and Honest Ways” was the slogan leading the GOP onward, affirming distance from government scandal and abandoning the egalitarian commission of the party’s radical wing. When it came time to stump for the nominee, Blaine et al. vigorously dove in, and they were joined by other skilled campaigners such as Blaine’s champion, Ingersoll, who was now fully behind Hayes, and Carl Schurz, who had made a name for himself as a main force among the Liberal Republicans in the previous campaign, and whose influence among Midwestern German immigrants was highly regarded by Republican strategists. Hayes himself held to tradition, preferring to keep a low profile while his surrogate colleagues stumped and canvassed across the country.
Among the nineteen planks in the Republican platform, the party, as stated above, promised civil service reform, reaffirmed the need to guarantee civil rights equally for all citizens, endorsed the distribution of public lands to homesteaders rather than to “corporations and monopolies” and the adoption of protective tariffs, and charged Congress with the “duty” to “fully investigate the effects of the immigration and importation of Mongolians on the moral and material interests of the country.” “Mongolian” in this sense was an unfortunate usage meant to describe anyone of Asian background; and the increase of Asian immigrants, especially from China, had, rightly or wrongly, raised concerns within the American electorate and was now a political issue strong enough to merit a platform plank.
The Democratic convention, held in St. Louis—the first national presidential nominating convention west of the Mississippi—was more easily settled. The front-runner, New York governor Samuel J. Tilden, an old Barnburner and Van Buren associate who temporarily broke from the party to support Old Kinderhook’s 1848 campaign on the Free Soil ticket, enjoyed the full support of most of the party’s leaders long before the opening of the convention. Like Hayes, Tilden was a reformer, and as such he had won a solid reputation for fighting corruption while serving as New York’s governor. He provided the kind of strong and expert leadership that the party had lacked in the previous two elections, and he was eagerly embraced by both elites and the rank and file. Seven other candidates, most notably governors Thomas A. Hendricks of Indiana and Winfield Scott Hancock of Pennsylvania, also brought some support to the convention. But on the first ballot, Tilden gathered 401 votes to 140 for Hendricks and 75 for Scott (the remaining votes scattered among five additional candidates), and on the second ballot, Tilden easily reached 535 votes to meet the required two-thirds majority. Hendricks was then nominated to run for vice president with almost no competition on the first ballot, taking all but eight abstaining delegates. The platform, dominated by the issues of reform and Reconstruction, read as follows:
Reform is necessary to rebuild and establish in the hearts of the whole people the Union eleven years ago happily rescued from the danger of the secession of States, but now to be saved from a corrupt centralism which, after inflicting upon ten States the rapacity of carpet-bag tyrannies, has honeycombed the offices of the Federal Government itself with incapacity, waste and fraud; infected States and municipalities with the contagion of misrule, and locked fast the prosperity of an industrious people in the paralysis of hard times. Reform is necessary to establish a sound currency, restore the public credit and maintain the national honor. (American Presidency Project, University of California, Santa Barbara)
The platform joined the Republicans in criticizing the government’s tolerance of Chinese immigrants, and it also asserted the need to transfer public lands to homesteaders rather than the interests of big business.
Both platforms were similar, as were the candidates themselves, for in many instances Tilden and Hayes were nearly identical in their approach to policy and their proposals for reform. “Tilden and Reform” was the Democrats’ primary slogan, a theme also stressed by the Hayes campaign. Tilden also favored rolling back Reconstruction, an attitude now shared by an increasing number of Republicans; along with Hayes, he favored advancing the policy of hard currency. With two candidates nearly identical in attitude and policy, both parties relied upon worn yet well-tested campaign techniques to mobilize their supporters. The Republican Party made effective use of songs such as “The Voice of the Nation’s Dead” and “We Will Not Vote for Tilden.” The emotive lyrics of “The Voice of the Nation’s Dead” left little to the imagination:
From mountain hill, and valley
A warning seems to come;
It is the voice of silence
From lips by death made dumb.
Refrain: Oh hear the sad refrain
From half a million slain,
Ah do not now surrender
What we have died to gain!
Attend, ye living freemen,
This call from out the grave;
It comes from faithful soldiers
Who died our land to save.
In the nineteenth century, sheet music was a popular medium for political boosterism. Republicans also used various songs to depict Hayes as a hero and leader. Republicans took the still immensely popular Whig chant “Tippecanoe and Tyler, Too!” from the legendary 1840 campaign and reworked it as “Hayes the True, Wheeler Too.” The Republican Party released a Hayes-Wheeler songbook that was widely circulated. The Democrats countered in kind, composing their own songs and publishing songbooks celebrating the Tilden legend.
Given the candidates’ similar positions, the parties yet again chose the low road, falling back on the familiar and reliable ad hominem rhetoric of the gutter to savage their opponents while promoting their respective champions. With the familiar rustling of the bloody shirt, Republicans impugned Tilden as a pro-slavery, pro-Confederate friend of the rich, accusing him of tax evasion and general swindling. Democrats charged Hayes with nothing less than murder—in an astonishing charge alleging the shooting of his own mother—as well as theft. The actual facts were not important to either side: Whoever was the opposition candidate was obviously a diabolical threat to the republic. In spite of the scandalmongering, more reasonable moments did occur. Mark Twain, the nation’s greatest satirist, who had publicly tilted his pointed, incomparable wit toward an incompetent and corrupt system, endorsed Hayes; and the political songbooks mentioned above offered a more positive note, as it were. But the tone of the campaign, by and large, was decidedly mean-spirited.
In addition to the traditional parties, two new minor parties, the Greenback and Prohibitionist parties, offered alternative diversions, the former driven largely by agricultural concerns and promoting the expanded use of paper currency (i.e., greenbacks) and nominating New York industrialist Peter Cooper for president; and the latter, as the name indicates, calling for the prohibition of alcohol and nominating Green Clay Smith, former governor of the Montana Territory, for president. But for the most part, the campaign was burdened with scurrilous aspersions lobbed from both directions. Nastiness was the rule, wit and innovation the exception. The absurdity of the actual election was eclipsed by the malice of the campaign. Ballot boxes were stuffed, polling was woefully inaccurate, and African American voters suffered widespread intimidation and deprivation of their constitutionally protected voting rights. The brief period of limited, budding democratic participation briefly enjoyed by the former slaves and their descendants was coming to an abrupt end, and the Democratic Party in the South was reasserting the monopoly that it had previously achieved in the 1850s, a monopoly that would only serve to benefit the white voter.
The actual election was among the closest—and strangest—in the history of American politics. According to MIT’s Mike Sheppard, had just a meager 445 votes in South Carolina shifted from Hayes to Tilden, the outcome would have been different, making the election of 1876, according to this measure, the second closest in history. Either way, it was certainly the most muddled to occur since the election of 1824, which was then marked by a four-way race; and as events unfolded, it was the first election since 1824 in which the winner of the popular vote was denied the presidency. But unlike 1824, when the winner of the popular vote, Andrew Jackson, polled a plurality of around 41 percent, Tilden won a clear popular majority by taking almost 51 percent to slightly under 48 percent for Hayes. When the polls did close, Tilden had apparently become the first Democrat in twenty years to win a presidential election, winning (if the numbers can be believed) 4.3 million popular votes, nearly a quarter of a million more than his opponent, and setting yet another record with the most popular votes gained by a candidate in American history to that point. But the dynamics of electoral politics conveyed a much different story. From within the Electoral College, Tilden managed only 184 electoral votes, just one shy of the needed majority, to Hayes’s initial total of 165. But not all the votes were included in those totals; 20 electoral votes were in dispute in Louisiana (8 votes), South Carolina (7 votes), and Florida (4 votes)—the only three states that were still under federal military occupation—with one electoral vote from Oregon also thrown into the controversy over questions of legality. The two minor parties gathered over 90,000 votes between them—most of them going to the Greenbacks—but none of these votes affected the outcome, as the minor-party candidates were not on the ballots in the disputed states.
Tilden, the winner of the popular vote, needed just one more Electoral College vote to become president. From November 8 until March 2 of the following year, just two days before the scheduled presidential inauguration, the battle for the disputed votes lingered. Not unexpectedly, during the interval between Election Day and the final resolution, angry hotheads on both sides of the dispute went as far as to threaten actual violence. Militant Democrats warned of blood in the streets unless Tilden was sworn in as president. Headlines splashed on the front pages of Democratic newspapers menacingly promised “Tilden or War!” In the end, the threats proved more bluff and bluster than reality. Congress was severely divided and frustrated. The Constitution required that the president of the Senate, who also happens to be the vice president of the United States under the Constitution, certify the results. However, complication was in play, owing to the fact that Vice President Henry Wilson had died in 1875, leaving the vice presidency vacant (as was the practice before the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, ratified in 1967), and he was thus replaced as president of the Senate (but technically not as vice president) by Senator Thomas Ferry, a Republican from Michigan, through internal Senate appointment. Because he was clearly not the vice president, Senator Ferry refused to take responsibility for certifying the results from the disputed states. Still further complicating the situation, Democrats controlled the House of Representatives and Republicans controlled the Senate, adding to the impasse. Finally in December, with the results of the election still uncertain, the House and Senate agreed to the establishment of a fifteen-member independent Electoral Commission to resolve the disputes over the electoral votes within the states in question. The Electoral Commission included five members of the Supreme Court, five House members, and five senators. Eight Republicans and seven Democrats served on the panel, giving the Republicans a one-vote majority should the outcome be decided strictly according to partisan loyalties.
Of particular significance, Republicans also controlled the separate election returns boards in the three contested southern states. These returns boards had the responsibility for certifying election results within their states, which included the authority to disqualify disputed ballots. Not surprisingly, all three boards certified the Republican electors, even though there was some evidence supported by unofficial tallies that had indicated a win for Tilden in Louisiana by a margin of over 6,000 votes. Votes in South Carolina were discounted, with the returns boards citing fraud. In Oregon, a state that Hayes seemed to have carried, Tilden loyalists continued to question the legal eligibility of one of the electors. Florida was extremely close and thus was at the very center of the controversy. The initial count in Florida held that Hayes had won by the remarkably slim margin of 43 popular votes, and a recount showed Tilden winning by a thin margin of 93. In the course of its investigation, the Electoral Commission concluded, by a partisan vote of eight to seven, that a number of ballots had been corrupted in Florida and thus were to be disqualified and discarded. With the elimination of these corrupted ballots, Hayes was declared the winner of the popular vote in Florida by a margin of around 1,000. With the quagmire in Florida resolved, the special Electoral Commission thereby awarded Hayes all 20 disputed electoral votes in the four states (three of them Southern) at issue, giving him a total of 185 votes to Tilden’s 184 and thus the presidency of the United States.
While the victory for Hayes boosted the spirits of the relieved Republicans after having lost the popular vote for the first time since 1856, it was, looking back, a portent of future problems for the party below the Mason-Dixon Line. Hayes won a majority of the states west of the Mississippi River—Texas, Missouri, and Arkansas being exceptions—all of New England except Connecticut, and the rest of the Northeast except for New York and New Jersey. Hayes also took the Midwest, losing only in Indiana. Tilden dominated the South and the border states, winning all but the three disputed states in that region, and showed the strength of the Democrats by retaking the Empire State (which had been lost to Grant in 1872 after it was won by Seymour in 1868). The election of 1876 would be the last time a Republican candidate for president would win any southern state until 1896, and it was the beginning of a Southern bloc that would not be cracked by Republicans until after World War II and that would prove impenetrable throughout the Deep South until the election of 1964 (not counting the Dixiecrat defection of 1948).
According to some accounts that have been largely accepted as true, a backroom compromise discreetly and secretly negotiated at Wormley’s Hotel in Washington, DC, involving members of Congress representing both parties, allegedly prompted Tilden to withdraw any legal claims to the White House in exchange for the final removal of the remaining federal troops still stationed in the three southern states at the heart of the election controversy—i.e., Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina—troops that were viewed there (at least by many among the white population) as an occupying force. This alleged deal was purported to have been further sweetened by an informal agreement to build a second transcontinental railroad through the South, along with the promise of new federal legislation to spur industrial improvements throughout the former Confederate states. While it is commonly held that these backroom deals, generally referred to as the “Compromise of 1877” (also called a “corrupt bargain,” evocative of allegations in the aftermath of the election of 1824), ensured Hayes’s presidency in exchange for the abandonment of federally directed political and social reforms in the South, some historians have noted that Hayes was in fact never really far from Tilden on the question of restoring home rule to all southern states, promising to allow every southern state the freedom to govern itself on the condition that it would guarantee equal rights for all citizens. Given this, there would have been little need for the Democrats to participate in such a needless arrangement as Tilden is said to have done in deferring to the election of Hayes. Furthermore, it is not clear to some historians that even if such a secret, informal agreement had actually been made, it would have done anything to alter the decision of the Electoral Commission. Thus, while the Compromise of 1877 has become widely assumed as fact, current historians are reconsidering its accuracy.
In any event, it is certain that, for various reasons that are difficult for us now to comprehend, Reconstruction was now over in the South, and this fact now seems to have less to do with the election of President Hayes than was previously held. It is unlikely that the termination of Reconstruction would have been prevented had Tilden become president rather than Hayes, and there is no evidence to lead us to that conclusion. Well before the election of Hayes, African American citizens were already threatened with reactionary white backlash and Klan terror throughout the South, even with the presence of federal troops in three states, and whether or not Tilden would have addressed that crisis any differently than Hayes cannot ever be known. Moreover, those troops were in reality only concentrated in a few areas within those three southern states; the rest of the South—including regions within the states in question—had already been free of any federal military presence for years. We also know that before finally removing the last federal occupation troops from the South, a newly inaugurated President Hayes had wrung a pledge from Southern leaders that they would support equal protection of the laws for whites and blacks throughout the South, a deal between Hayes and the southern states that, again, has no direct link to a “Hayes-Tilden Compromise.” But in the end, the pledge was broken, the law of the land defied, and the position of African Americans reduced, in some parts of the South, to a condition slightly better than the slavery under which their ancestors had suffered for so long. In the end, only two things were certain: A candidate who had won more total popular votes than anyone in history would not be the president, the political rights of African Americans had been severely abridged and in some places utterly stolen, and the ramifications of these developments would plague the future of American democracy for nearly a century.
The American Presidency Project. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu.
Holt, Michael F. By One Vote: The Disputed Presidential Election of 1876. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2011.
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