On Election Day that November, the Democrats appeared to come out on
top, winning the swing states of Connecticut, Indiana, New York and New
Jersey. By midnight, Tilden had 184 of the 185 electoral votes he needed
to win and was leading the popular vote by 250,000. The Republicans
refused to accept defeat, however, and accused Democratic supporters of
intimidating and bribing African-American voters to prevent them from
voting in three southern states–Florida, Louisiana and South Carolina.
As of 1876, these were the only remaining states in the South with
Republican governments.
In South Carolina, the election had been marred by bloodshed on both
sides of the party line. Supporters of the Democratic gubernatorial
candidate Wade Hampton, a former Confederate general, had used violence
and intimidation to confront the African-American voting majority. A
clash between black militia and armed whites in Hamburg in July ended in
the death of five militiamen after their surrender, while at Camboy
(near Charleston) six white men were killed when armed blacks opened
fire in a political meeting. With both sides accusing each other of
electoral fraud, South Carolina, along with Florida and Louisiana,
submitted two sets of election returns with different results.
Meanwhile, in Oregon, the state’s Democratic governor replaced a
Republican elector with a Democrat (alleging that the Republican had
been ineligible), thus throwing Hayes’ victory in that state into
question as well.
Compromise of 1877: Congress Steps In
To resolve the dispute, Congress set up an electoral commission in
January 1877, consisting of five U.S. representatives, five senators and
five Supreme Court justices. The commission’s members included seven
Democrats, seven Republicans, and one independent, Justice David Davis.
When Davis refused to serve, the moderate Republican Justice Joseph
Bradley was chosen to replace him.
During the commission’s deliberations, Hayes’ Republican allies met
in secret with moderate southern Democrats in hopes of convincing them
not to block the official counting of votes through filibuster and
effectively allow Hayes’ election. In February, at a meeting held in
Washington’s Wormley Hotel, the Democrats agreed to accept a Hayes
victory and to respect the civil and political rights of African
Americans, on the condition that Republicans withdraw all federal troops
from South, thus consolidating Democratic control in the region. Hayes
would also have to agree to name a leading southerner to his cabinet and
to support federal aid for the Texas and Pacific Railroad, a planned
transcontinental line via a southern route. On March 2, the
congressional commission voted 8-7 along party lines to award all the
disputed electoral votes to Hayes, giving him 185 votes to Tilden’s 184.
Compromise of 1877: The End of Reconstruction
Hayes appointed Tennessee’s David Key as postmaster general but never
followed through on the promised land grant for the Texas and Pacific.
Within two months, however, Hayes had ordered federal troops from their
posts guarding Louisiana and South Carolina statehouses, allowing
Democrats to seize control in both those states. As Florida’s Supreme
Court had earlier declared a Democratic victory in the 1876
gubernatorial election, Democrats had been restored to power all across
the South.
The Compromise of 1876 effectively ended the Reconstruction era.
Southern Democrats’ promises to protect civil and political rights of
blacks were not kept, and the end of federal interference in southern
affairs led to the widespread disenfranchisement of blacks voters. From
the late 1870s onward, southern legislatures passed a series of laws
requiring the separation of whites from “persons of color” on public
transportation, in schools, parks, restaurants, theaters and other
locations. Known as the “Jim Crow laws” (after a popular minstrel act
developed in the antebellum years), these segregationist statutes
governed life in the South through the middle of the next century,
ending only after the hard-won successes of the civil rights movement in
the 1960s.
