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The Compromise of 1877. The Compromise of 1877 gave Rutherford B. Hayes the presidency in exchange for the end of. Reconstruction in the South.
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Mr. Burns/Mr. Milano American History Reconstruction – End of Reconstruction – Close Reading Name: ____________________________ Date: _____________ Period: __________ The Compromise of 1877 The Compromise of 1877 gave Rutherford B. Hayes the presidency in exchange for the end of Reconstruction in the South. Hayes was the Republican candidate for president in 1876 against the Domocratic candidate Samuel Tilden. In those days Democrats were generally favorable to the South and supported slavery while Republicans were anti-slavery and anti- South. Democratic candidate Samuel J. Tilden of New York won 247,448 more popular votes than Republican Rutherford B. Hayes of Ohio. But the electoral votes in the three southern states of Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina were disputed. Reasons for this are complex, but were essentially questions surrounding the votes cast. This was only a few years after the end of the Civil War, and for almost four months, from November into late February, tensions remained high as the question of who was to become the nation’s next president remained unresolved. In January 1877, Congress established a 15- member Electoral Commission to resolve the issue of which candidate had won the contested states. The commission voted 8-7 along party lines to award the votes of all three states to Hayes, the Republican. Democrats agreed that Rutherford B. Hayes would become president in exchange for the withdrawal of federal troops from the South and the granting of home rule (self-rule) in the South. This was an informal, unwritten, agreement between Hayes and the Congressmen. During Reconstruction, federal troops (solders) occupied the South. These troops served to guarantee African American men's right to vote, and the Republican-controlled federal government would only end the military occupation when states rewrote their Constitutions to recognize the citizenship and voting rights of African American men.
White Southerners generally despised these troops, and wanted an end to the intervention of the federal government in the South. Part of the reason for this is that they wanted to return African-Americans to conditions of slavery as closely as possible. The Compromise of 1877 gave white Southerners their chance to stop the military occupation of the South. Within two months of becoming president, Hayes ordered federal troops in Louisiana and South Carolina to return to their bases. Another important part of the Compromise of 1877 was that Republicans agreed to home-rule in the South. Home-rule meant that the Republican Party would refrain from interfering in the South’s local affairs, and that white Democrats, many of them racist, would rule. Southern Democrats, for their part, pledged that they would “recognize the civil and political equality of blacks.” They did not carry through on this promise but instead disfranchised (took away ) black men’s right to vote and imposed Jim Crow segregation across the South. With the Compromise of 1877, the Republican Party abandoned the last remnant of its support for equal rights for African Americans in the South. With the withdrawal of federal troops went any hope of reconstructing the South as a racially- egalitarian (equal) society after the end of slavery. As Henry Adams, a black Louisianan, said sadly, “The whole South—every state in the South—had got into the hands of the very men that held us as slaves.”