Essay: The Election of 1876 and the Compromise of 1877

The Election of 1876 and the Compromise of 1877 were both possibly unconstitutional and not entirely moral, but their outcome was better for the country as a whole. (Gilder-Lehrman) While it infuriated many people, it kept the country out of a second Civil War, and it helped the South revitalize it’s economy. The decisions and agreements also made sure that a little bit more of the government was anti-white supremacist, which helped along the process of civil rights for all. It helped solidify the country into something that wasn’t North and South, but a truly United States of America. (McNamara/Gilder-Lehrman)
The candidates for president were Rutherford B. Hayes and Samuel J. Tilden. Hayes was a compromise candidate, as James G. Blaine was supposed to be the Republican candidate. However, Blaine had been in a railroad money scandal earlier that year, and was inapplicable for the candidacy. Hayes was a native Ohioan, and his early life was spent in Ohio. He went to college at Kenyon College, in Gambier, Ohio. His original political impetus came from his time serving in the Civil War, in which he earned his way to the rank of brevet major general. He was then elected to the House of Representatives, and began his political career. Tilden was an obvious candidate, with a legal record that included his prosecution of William Marcy “Boss” Tweed, the famously corrupt political boss from New York. He was a native New Yorker, but he was a strong Democrat, and he supported the party’s views. (McNamara/Whitehouse.gov/ Encyclopædia Britannica)
The situation was thus; The southern Democrats are furious that the South is still being occupied by Federal forces. The Republicans are anxious that a Democratic president, combined with a Democratic House of Representatives, will undo the hard work of Reconstruction, and might even move to repeal the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments. Neither side is happy, and some are rallying for another Civil War. The election continues on, and both sides have ardent supporters, with even Mark Twain stumping for Hayes. However, as the popular votes are counted, it is for 4,284,020 Tilden to 4,036,572 for Hayes. That alone, however, would not let Tilden win. He needed at least 185 electoral votes to win a majority. He had 184, while Hayes had 165. The last states to submit electoral votes, Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina, were still in dispute. Their 19 votes, and one disputed one from Oregon, would decide the election. The night before the votes from those states were counted, Hayes went to sleep believing he had lost. Here comes the interesting, maybe unconstitutional part. The votes were so disputed that each party sent their own batch of votes, one that would decide the win for Hayes, and one for Tilden. This put the government and the nation in a whirlwind of confusion. Who was going to be elected? (HarpWeek/Gilder-Lehrman)
Congress had a solution. They created a Federal Electoral Commission. This commission was to vote on which way each of the twenty disputed electoral votes were to be given. They selected five senators (three Republicans, two Democrats), five representatives (three Democrats, two Republicans), and four justices (two Republicans, two Democrats), who would then select one of their colleagues for the commission. That last justice was supposed to be the less party bound, independent, and moderate, Justice David Davis. However, he was elected to the Senate by Illinois’ Republican party, so he resigned the judiciary, and was therefore ineligible for the position. His replacement, Justice Joseph Bradley, was a New Jersey Republican, and that decided the voting of the commission, in favor of Hayes. (Gilder-Lehrman/Encyclopedia.com)
However, there were other forces at work, other than the arguably rigged commission. One of them was the so-called Compromise of 1877. This alleged informal compromise was  written down only sparingly and in parts, and rarely spoken of. It was an agreement that would decide the election, and would control at least two presidents actions, which in turn made history the way it is today. It consisted of several points. The first, and most immediately pressing, was the removal of federal troops from the south. This would then permit one of the subpoints, home rule for the south, to occur. Democrats wanted the removal of troops, and martial law in the south was also viewed as corrupt by many Republicans. That made the removal of troops a very useful bargaining tool for the Republicans, as they controlled the troops, and if they offered to remove troops in exchange for the third point I will mention, the deal would have been well worth the time and effort. The second point was the reformation of the monetary system, as the paper money issued during the Civil War had little to no value, and there had to be a return to the gold standard. This priority was supported by both parties, and it was not debated or argued over in the compromise. The third point of the compromise, and the most controversial, was who would be “allowed” to win the White House. The part about the presidency is the most discussed part of the Compromise, as it is not entirely clear whether it actually happened. However, for the sake of discourse, it will be accepted as fact. This part of the compromise would decide the deal. It stated that, if the first two parts of the deal were met, the Democrats would let the election commission go through, and seeing as the commission was balanced towards the Republicans, Hayes would win. (Boundless US History/AuthenticHistory.com/Gilder-Lehrman/Richter)
The compromise first kicked in even before Hayes was sworn in, at the end of Grant’s administration, with the removal of federal troops and interventions from the south. The reformation of the monetary gold standard was never entirely acted on during Hayes administration, and it was debated throughout the next several years. (Chicago Tribune) The last point, that of letting Hayes win or not, was apparently resolved, as the Federal Election Commission was permitted to go through. All of the events mentioned in the last paragraph happened after the first ballots had come in for the 1876 election, and before the last election dispute was settled. (Boundless US History)
The immediate effects of the election were many. The most immediately important was the effect on specie and paper currency. The Southern Democrats, who had now gained home rule for the South, were in favor of economic inflation. They tried to add silver back into the currency system through the Bland-Allison Act. Silver had been removed by the Silver Demonetization Act, which had been made in response to fears that Gresham’s Law, “bad money (money whose commodity value does not match it’s face value) drives out good (money whose face and commodity values are roughly equal)”, would ruin the economy. The new Democratic leadership tried to quell those fears by saying that the ratio of silver to gold would be sixteen to one, meaning sixteen ounces of silver would be worth one ounce of gold. However, now President Hayes vetoed the measure. The Congress Democrats passed it over his head, and threatened to repeal the Resumption Act. The two sides compromised with the Fort Act, which left the Resumption Act intact, but let $42 million in greenbacks stay in circulation after January 1, 1879. Those greenbacks could be redeemed for gold specie at any time. (Gilder-Lehrman/Richter)
One of the lasting effects of the Compromise of 1877 was the restoration of southern home rule. While it seems like a short term deal, it actually affected the civil rights movement and the economy we know today. The first was affected by the fact that the South, with the ability to make it’s own laws and regulations, started the creation of Jim Crow laws, which divided the South into white and black, under the guise of being “separate but equal”, but really just denigrated blacks to being lower class citizens, even barring the right to vote until the Civil Rights Act of 1964. However, the compromise helped in several ways, and those ways affect us to this day. The first way is that Tilden did not win, which kept white supremacy out of the White House. The second is that the economy regained stability, and it gave a set way of coping and fixing economic instability for when the Panic of 1893 occurred. The last benefit is that it stopped a second Civil War, which very well might have ended this experiment in democracy right then, back in 1877. (United States History.com/Richter/Gilder-Lehrman)
The Compromise of 1877 affected our country in many ways. It kept the country together through a time of strife. However, it also reinforced the legality of white supremacists in the south. It also kept the economy alive for the next twenty-six years, until the Panic of 1893. The Election of 1876 and the Compromise of 1877 were both arguably unconstitutional and heinous in the extreme, but their outcome was better for the country as a whole, and it shaped the country we know today.