Compromise of 1877

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COMPROMISE OF 1877

Four of the sectional compromises in nineteenth-century America were efforts to settle quarrels by mutual concessions and forestall danger of violence. Three of the four efforts were temporarily successful, and only the fourth, that of 1861, broke down in failure. For the next sixteen years, during the civil war and reconstruction, differences were resolved by resort to force. The Compromise of 1877 differed from the earlier ones in several ways, one of them being that its main purpose was to foreclose rather than to forestall resort to armed force. Since the Republican party was committed to force when necessary to protect freedmen's rights under the constitutional amendments and civil rights acts of the Reconstruction period, any repudiation of such commitments had to be negotiated discreetly.

Under President andrew johnson and President ulysses s. grant, the government had been backing away from enforcement of freedmen's rights almost from the start. In part the result of white resistance in the South, this retreat from Reconstruction was also a consequence of the prevalence of white-supremacy sentiment in the North. In the elections of 1874, regarded by some as a referendum on Reconstruction, the Republican House majority of 110 was replaced by a Democratic majority of sixty. And in the ensuing presidential election of 1876 the Democratic candidate, Samuel J. Tilden, won a majority of the popular votes and was conceded 184 of the 185 electoral votes required for election. He also claimed all the nineteen contested votes of South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana, the only southern states remaining under Republican control. But so did his Republican opponent, Rutherford B. Hayes, who also claimed the election. The impasse was solved by an agreement between the two political parties (not the sections) to create a bipartisan electoral commission of fifteen to count the votes. An unanticipated last minute change of one member of the commission gave the Republicans a majority of one, and by that majority they counted all contested votes for Hayes. That eliminated Tilden, but to seat Hayes required formal action of the House. The Democratic majority, enraged over what they regarded as a "conspiracy" to rob them of their victory, talked wildly of resistance and started a filibuster.

Foreseeing the victory of Hayes, southern Democrats sought to salvage whatever they could out of defeat. Their prime objective was "home rule," which meant not only withdrawal of troops that sustained Republican rule in South Carolina and Louisiana but also a firm Republican commitment to abandon use of force in the future for defending rights of freedmen, carpetbaggers, and scalawags. This amounted to the virtual nullification of the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments and the civil rights act. In return southern conservatives promised to help confirm Hayes's election, and many Democrats of the old Whig persuasion promised to cooperate with the new administration, but not to defect to the Republican party unless it abandoned "radicalism."

With control of the army and the submission of enough northern Democrats, Republicans could have seated Hayes anyway. But the southerners exploited Republican fears of resistance and skillfully played what they later admitted was "a bluff game." An old Whig himself, Hayes fell in with the idea of reconstituting his party in the South under conservative white leaders in place of carpetbaggers. He not only pledged "home rule" but promised to appoint a conservative southern Democrat to his cabinet and sweetened his appeal to that constituency by publicly pledging generous support to bills for subsidizing " internal improvements of a national character" in the South. Hayes's election was confirmed only two days before he took office.

As in earlier sectional compromises, not all the terms of that of 1877 were fulfilled, but the main ones were. Hayes appointed a southern Democrat his postmaster general, chief dispenser of patronage, and placed many other white conservatives in southern offices. Bills for federal subsidies to internal improvements met with more success than ever before. The troops sustaining Republican rule in the two states were removed and Democrats immediately took over. In the civil rights cases (1883) the Supreme Court erected the state action barrier, severely limiting the reach of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Court's opinion was written by Justice joseph p. bradley, who had been a member of the 1877 electoral commission. More important than all this was the pledge against resort to force to protect black rights. That commitment held firm for eighty years, until the military intervention at Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957. This set a record for durability among sectional compromises.

C. Vann Woodward
(1986)