Race, Politics, and Chaos in the Capitol: The Election of 1876

Election Series, Episode #2 of 4. The consequences of 1876 were enormous. To end the the election limbo, Democratic and Republican politicians worked out a shadowy deal in which Rutherford Hayes was declared the president (by one electoral vote!) and the Republicans agreed to end Reconstruction in the former Confederacy. The results of the “Compromise of 1877” were a total abandonment of the process of reforming the South from a land ruled by white supremacy and defined by slavery to one of freedom and equal rights. The federal government effectively washed its hands of Reconstruction and left the South to its own devices. The result was … not good. As one freedman, Henry Adams, described it: “The whole South – every state in the South – had got into the hands of the very men that held us as slaves.” Today, as part of our series on elections, we’re talking about 1876, the election that ended Reconstruction, upended the accomplishments of the Civil War era, derailed civil rights, and allowed for the reign of Jim Crow. 

Bibliography

DuBois, W. E. B. Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880. New York: The Free Press, 1998. 

Foner, Eric. A Short History of Reconstruction. New York: Harper Collins, 1990. 

Foner, Eric. Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1865-1877. New York: Harper Collins, 1988. 

Holt, Michael F. By One Vote: The Disputed Presidential Election of 1876. Lawrence: Kansas State University Press, 2008. 

Rehnquist, William H. Centennial Crisis: The Disputed Election of 1876. New York: Knopf, 2004. 

Woodward, C. Vann. Reunion & Reaction: The Compromise of 1877 and the End of Reconstruction. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1951. 

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