{"id":627,"date":"2017-01-12T20:52:19","date_gmt":"2017-01-12T20:52:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mathwise.net\/?p=627"},"modified":"2017-01-12T20:52:19","modified_gmt":"2017-01-12T20:52:19","slug":"compromise-of-1877","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/mathwise.net\/?p=627","title":{"rendered":"Compromise of 1877"},"content":{"rendered":"<style>\n<!--\nh1 {\n\tfont-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\n\tfont-size: 17px;\n\tline-height: 20px;\n\tfont-weight: bold;\n\tmargin: 0px 0px 10px 0px;\n\tpadding: 0px;\n}\n\n-->\n<\/style>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: 'Old English Text MT'; font-size: xx-large;\">Compromise of 1877<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<div align=\"left\">\n<a name=\"wptoc_0_0_0\"><\/a><h1>Compromise of 1877<\/h1>\n<a name=\"wptoc_0_1_0\"><\/a><h3><span style=\"font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\">Reconstruction Ends<\/span><\/h3>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\">The presidential election of 1876 celebrated 100 years since the Declaration of Independence.\u00a0 This election, however, proved so divisive that there were fears of another Civil War.\u00a0 When the dust settled there emerged a tainted president and a South free of Yankee soldiers. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\">For fourteen years various schemes of reconstruction had been attempted with varying levels of success.\u00a0 Some states had been fully reconstructed and were part of the Union once again without need of federal troops. A few Southern states still had the hated Yankee soldiers. The reason the troops were still there was that they were needed. Every election in these states still had the attendant violence with most of that coming from Night Rider groups trying to intimidate Republican voters.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\">US army patrols still had a tough time with the Night Riders, though the troops did make things considerably safer.\u00a0 Still, Republican voters were uniformly those singled out for beatings and intimidation. While the legitimate Democratic party condemned these attacks, they were hardly vigilant about stopping it.\u00a0 In Democratic controlled counties the only hope for law enforcement came from federal troops. Republicans lived in fear.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\">The debate over this &#8220;bayonet reconstruction&#8221; went like this: Democracy in the South was being stifled by Yankee troops and Republican administrations\u00a0 who were not wanted there.\u00a0 Though there was some support for the troops and Republican administrations, the simple fact was that if you allowed civil rights for all adults in these states, the Republicans would almost always lose.\u00a0 Many Republicans in the North were tiring of the effort to create a viable Republican party in the South.\u00a0 In almost every state where the Redeemers took over, the Republicans went into decline as white Republicans would change parties and black Republicans would have drops in voter turnout.\u00a0 The result was the same: Democrats started winning and kept winning.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\">To many, the Republican were simply an occupying force which flew in the face of democracy.\u00a0 They were not a true majority party and depended on the soldiers to stay in power and keep Democrats from voting.\u00a0 Democrats retaliated with Night Rider intimidation. It was rather ugly.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\">All this paled in the anger over the 1876 election.\u00a0 The Democratic candidate clearly won the popular vote and the all-important electoral vote.\u00a0 However, there were disputes over voting in Oregon and South Carolina. A commission was set up to solve the dispute. The commission dominated by Republicans decided that both Oregon and South Carolina had narrowly voted Republican.\u00a0 Republican control over both states contributed to the fortuitous decision of the commission.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\">Republican Rutherford B. Hayes was declared the President. However, in the backroom dealing over this there was made a significant compromise deal: The Democrats would not make a huge stink about the decision to award the election to Hayes, but the Republicans had to agree to pull the Yankee troops out of the remaining Southern states.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\">This deal effectively ended &#8220;bayonet reconstruction,&#8221; and all of reconstruction.\u00a0 As it died, Republicans and Democrats made promises that the civil rights of all Southerners would be respected.\u00a0 Republicans were not to fear the expected Redeemer governments.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\">For a few years this was the case.\u00a0 However, by the 1880s it was clear that the Yankee troops would never return.\u00a0 As the threat faded, Democratic officials were less likely to investigate and convict those implicated in voter intimidation.\u00a0 This made Democratic victories even more lopsided.\u00a0 Black voter participation (the most important Republican group) began to decline. By the 1880s, the lynching of suspected criminals began again in the South with hundreds happening in some years, however, very few of those lynched were black.\u00a0 This was due to the fear that lynching blacks could bring back the solders.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\">However, by the 1890s, the redeemer governments began to segregate facilities by race and the lynching of blacks began to accelerate greatly and soon more blacks than whites were being killed without the benefit of a trial.\u00a0 The final &#8220;approval&#8221; of the redeemer governments came in 1898 when the Plessy v. Ferguson decision legalized segregation with the famous phrase, &#8220;seperate but equal.&#8221;\u00a0 With that victory segregationists accelerated the separation of the races and soon did not even bother to worry about the &#8220;equal&#8221; part.\u00a0 Also in the 1890s, the great denial of civil rights to Southern blacks became commonplace as poll taxes, literacy tests and intimidation effectively ended the practice of voting by Southern blacks.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\">The great experiment of Radical Reconstruction had ended in victory for the South.\u00a0 The idea of making a new south with a native Republican party and full civil rights for blacks was dead<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;\">Black Southerners would have to wait until the 1960s to regain those civil rights with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.\u00a0 And it would take an unusual alliance of Republicans and Northern Democrats to break a Southern Democratic filibuster to make that happen.\u00a0 That and some pushing from a man named Martin Luther King, Jr.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Compromise of 1877 &nbsp; Compromise of 1877 Reconstruction Ends &nbsp; The presidential election of 1876 celebrated 100 years since the Declaration of Independence.\u00a0 This election, however, proved so divisive that there were fears of another Civil War.\u00a0 When the dust settled there emerged a tainted president and a South free of Yankee soldiers. For fourteen &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/mathwise.net\/?p=627\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Compromise of 1877<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-627","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/mathwise.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/627","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/mathwise.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/mathwise.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mathwise.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mathwise.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=627"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/mathwise.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/627\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":628,"href":"http:\/\/mathwise.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/627\/revisions\/628"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/mathwise.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=627"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mathwise.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=627"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mathwise.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=627"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}