Rutherford B Hayes And The Compromise Of 1877

An offhand remark by Robert Barnes a week ago planted a seed in my thinking: he said the current contested election cycle should be compared to the contested elections of 1824 and 1876. Now, maybe I wasn't paying attention in American History class, but I don't think much was ever said about either of these elections. In the 1824 election, none of the candidates, led by John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson, achieved a majority in the Electoral College. Under the provisions of the Twelfth Amendment to the US Constitution, the election went to the House of Representatives, where Adams was selected. I may discuss this separately in greater depth.

The 1824 lection was the only contested election to go to the House. A similar disputed electoral result of 19 votes in 1876 was resolved by an ad hoc commission. Rutherford B Hayes, who had already been nominated as a compromise candidate by the Republicans in 1876, was awarded the 19 disputed votes, plus an additional vote from a disqualified Oregon elector, by the commission, in a deal called the Compromise of 1877. The selection of Hayes, a Republicasn, was part of a deal that includedd the removal of federal troops who were protecting Reconstruction governments in Southern states, which effectively ended Reconstruction and tacitly returned the South to Democrat control.

If I try to put this in the overall context of Ferdinand Lundberg's paradigm of post-Civil War US politics, I think it fits. The 1877 Compromise allowed the industrial revolution to extend into the Southern states, most immediately in the ability to exploit coal and lumber in the border states to benefit Northern capital and industry. This was accomplished with Northern capital under an agreement that allowed it to be done with Southern Democrat support.

The tensions this created for the freed African=American slaves and their descendants in a Southern society run behind the scenes by rich Northern liberals is brilliantly depicted in Ralph Ellison's novel Invisible Man. I think in broad outlines, Ferdinand Lundberg would agree that this was a major component of the political settlement that emerged in 1877. whereby Northern capital would tolerate segregation, and in fact enable poor conditions for African-Americans in Northern cities, in return for a free political hand elsewhere.

It occurs to me that another historical trend that was contemporary with the 1877 settlement was the rise of "new style" liberal Protestantism as expressed by figures like Henry Ward Beecher. This was also in many ways a project of post-Civil War capital, with the adoption of Gothic church architecture and the hihgly popular Anglo-Catholic style in the Episcopal Church.

The one area where I would take exception to Robert Barnes's insight, though, is that the 1824 and 1876 eections were disputed but resolved in peaceable settlements. But the 1860 election was also disputed. That was a very different matter, and it wasn't resolvd in a compromise. Abraham Lincoln was neither John Quincy Adams nor Rutherford B Hayes.