Compromise of 1877

Compromise of 1877. One of four nineteenth‐century political compromises designed to hold the states together without resort to force, the Compromise of 1877 was the last and in some respects the most successful. Unlike the previous compromises, that of 1877 was framed in secrecy. The occasion was the disputed presidential election of 1876 in which each candidate—the Republican Rutherford Hayes and the Democrat Samuel J. Tilden (1814–1886), the governor of New York—claimed a majority of electoral votes. The traditional account by historians told of a last‐minute bargain in which the Republicans agreed to abandon the two remaining Republican state governments in the South and their protection of freedmen's rights in exchange for a pledge by southern Democrats to support Hayes.

In reality, negotiations had gone on for months and involved many more interests than electoral politics. The Democratic party in the South and the Republican party in the North had both fallen under the dominance of conservatives, often former Whigs. Negotiations between these two groups were conducted by the nonpartisan Western Associated Press, to which belonged all important newspapers of the Mississippi Valley, South and North. Confederate Colonel Andrew Jackson Keller of the Memphis Avalanche and Union General Henry Van Ness Boynton of the Cincinnati Gazette did most of the bargaining. They found a South battered first by the war and then by severe depression, desperately demanding federal subsidies for new or deteriorated railroads, fallen bridges, destroyed public buildings, and blocked harbors. Bills for such subsidies flooded Congress, supported in large measure by powerful corporate lobbies. Hayes, working closely with Keller and Boynton, promised that “to restore peace and prosperity to the South,” he would be “exceptionally liberal” about internal improvements. As expected, enough southern Democratic congressmen opposed the pro‐Tilden filibuster plan of northern Democrats to thwart it. The electoral commission ruled in favor of Hayes, who was peacefully inaugurated.

While Hayes's promise of federal subsidies went largely unfulfilled, disappointing southern capitalists, the principal losers in the compromise were the ex‐slaves, abandoned by the Republican party. But Radical Reconstruction was already on the wane, and Tilden would probably have wiped out what remained of it even more quickly than did Hayes.
See also African Americans; Civil War; Gilded Age; Whig Party.

Bibliography

Keith Ian Polakoff , The Politics of Inertia: The Election of 1876 and the End of Reconstruction, 1973.

C. Vann Woodward