By Dustin McLochlin, Ph.D.
Hayes Presidential Library & Museums Historian
Public attention has increasingly been piqued by allegations of voting fraud and stolen elections due to unproven fraud claims surrounding the 2020 election. A ready example of voting problems that politicians and political analysts point to is the 1876 election since it involved many months of bitter partisan fighting over the returns. It resulted in an Electoral Commission to determine the outcome. It led to a filibuster and negotiations that provide, for modern analysists, dramatic intrigue of backroom bargains. And, it took place at a moment when Southern Democratic leaders were regaining their strength while civil rights gained by Black Americans after the Civil War were diminishing. Yet, the 1876 presidential election was not the turning point it is made out to be by such films as “How to Rig an Election.” But, it does tell us something about our past.
First, it reminds us that despite the passage of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, civil rights were not protected. The official election returns showed that the Democratic candidate Samuel Tilden won by just over 260,000 votes. Yet Republican candidate Rutherford B. Hayes correctly diagnosed the reason: “No doubt both fraud and violence intervened to produce the result.” He understood that intimidation and murder suppressed the turnout of Black voters, who were largely Republicans, throughout the South.
Republicans attempted to right this wrong by stopping the returns in the three states of which they still controlled the state governments: Florida, Louisiana and South Carolina. Both parties sent agents to these states. Republicans moved to disqualify returns from counties and parishes that showed evidence of violence directed at Black voters. They sent returns to Washington arguing that Hayes won the election. The Democrats sent an alternate set of returns.
Second, this election gives us an example of how Congress moved to arbitrate conflicting returns. It created an Electoral Commission. This was a temporary body made up of equal parts Republican and Democrat with a tie-breaking independent member. Historians have explained in detail how Supreme Court Justice Joseph Bradley became this independent arbitrator, but he leaned Republican. The Commission voted in favor of Hayes in each contested vote. The Democrats, despite favoring the Commission’s creation, moved to filibuster the results. During these dilatory motions in Congress, associates of Hayes met with key Louisiana Democrats at the Wormley Hotel. To what authority his associates had to speak on his behalf is part of the historical debate. However, historians such as Rachel Shelden and Erik Alexander who wrote for the Washington Post point out “this supposed Compromise of 1877 is largely a myth, debunked by historians decades ago.”
Additionally, opinion pieces often state that Hayes removed federal troops from the South, causing a death blow to civil rights, as part of a bargain struck at the hotel. Hayes removed no troops. Instead, he recalled them from two statehouses and ordered them to nearby barracks. Was the impact on civil rights not the same? Historian Heather Cox Richardson in her newsletter “Letters from an American”, points out that we have mischaracterized the end of Reconstruction and it might best be placed when the last Southern state was restored to the Union in 1870.
Which leads to the final point. After Southern states were restored and their congressional representatives reinstated, federal presence in the South declined. By the time the 1876 election occurred, the era of Reconstruction, characterized by increased participation of Black men in government and within the election process, had sadly already passed. Historians have made this point ad nauseam. Historian Eric Foner’s seminal work “Reconstruction” argues that “rather than an abrupt change in Northern policy, Hayes’s actions, as the New York Herald pointed out, only confirmed in two states ‘what in the course of years has been done by his predecessor or by Congress elsewhere in the South.” Historian William Gillette in “Retreat from Reconstruction” bluntly states: “The Republicans had not abandoned [Black Americans] to gain the presidency, since [their] cause had been, in large part, given up prior to 1876-1877.” Even the popular history, ominously titled “Fraud of the Century,” admits “the Wormley agreement was more a mutual concession of the obvious than a device for controlling larger events.”
Simply put, black men and women had fleeting power in post-Civil War America because white public opinion and most decision-makers in Washington rejected or ignored the protection of civil rights for the long-term.
While it is understandable that individuals feel strongly about the problems we as a nation are dealing with in our current democracy, it is just as important to remember that incorrect conclusions about our past are not effective tools in helping us understand our current dilemmas.