The Election of 1876

In many ways, the presidential election of 1876 epitomized the politics of the era, in its closed-door nature and the questionable ethics involved. The country was in the middle of an economic downturn caused by the Panic of 1873, a downturn that would ultimately last until 1879. With President Grant coming to the end of the traditional two-term limit, the Republican Party nominated a three-time governor from Ohio, Rutherford B. Hayes.

Hayes was a popular candidate who advocated for both “hard money” and civil service reform. “Hard money” is an economy based upon gold currency transactions—to protect against inflationary pressures.  Civil service reform was replacing the practice of handing out government jobs as “spoils” with recruitment based on merit and qualifications. Most importantly, Hayes had no significant political scandals in his past, unlike his predecessor Grant, whose administration was tainted by the Crédit Mobilier of America scandal. In this most notorious example of Gilded Age corruption, several congressmen accepted cash and stock bribes in return for appropriating inflated federal funds for the construction of the transcontinental railroad.

The Democrats likewise sought a candidate who could champion reform against growing political corruption. They found their man in Samuel J. Tilden, governor of New York and a self-made millionaire, who had made a successful political career fighting corruption in New York City. Tilden became a national figure by spearheading the prosecution against Tammany Hall Boss William Tweed (who belonged to his own Democratic party), which led to Tweed’s conviction and later imprisonment for embezzling money. Both parties tapped into the popular mood of the day, each claiming to champion reform and promising an end to the corruption that had become rampant in Washington. Likewise, both parties pledged an end to post-Civil War Reconstruction.

Figure 1. These campaign posters for Rutherford B. Hayes (a) and Samuel Tilden (b) underscore the tactics of each party, which remained largely unchanged, regardless of the candidates. The Republican placard highlights the party’s role in preserving “liberty and union” in the wake of the Civil War, hoping to tap into the northern voters’ pride in victory over secession. The Democratic poster addresses the economic turmoil and corruption of the day, specifically that of the Grant administration, promising “honesty, reform, and prosperity” for all.

The campaign was a typical one for the era: Democrats shone a spotlight on earlier Republican scandals, such as the Crédit Mobilier affair, and Republicans relied upon the bloody shirt campaign, reminding the nation of the terrible human toll of the war against southern confederates who now reappeared in national politics under the mantle of the Democratic Party. President Grant previously had great success with the “bloody shirt” strategy in the 1868 election, when Republican supporters attacked Democratic candidate Horatio Seymour for his sympathy with New York City draft rioters during the war. In 1876, true to the campaign style of the day, neither Tilden nor Hayes actively campaigned for office, instead relying upon supporters and other groups to promote their causes.

Fearing a significant African American and White Republican voter turnout in the South, particularly in the wake of the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which further empowered African Americans with protection in terms of public accommodations, Democrats relied upon White supremacist terror organizations to intimidate Black Americans and Republicans, including physically assaulting many while they attempted to vote. The Redshirts, based in Mississippi and the Carolinas, and the White League in Louisiana, relied upon intimidation tactics similar to the Ku Klux Klan but operated in a more open and organized fashion with the sole goal of restoring Democrats to political predominance in the South. In several instances, Redshirts would attack freedmen who attempted to vote, whipping them openly in the streets while simultaneously hosting barbecues to attract Democratic voters to the polls. Women throughout South Carolina began to sew red flannel shirts for the men to wear as a sign of their political views; women themselves began wearing red ribbons in their hair and bows about their waists.

The Compromise that Ended Reconstruction

Figure 2. Titled “A Truce not a Compromise,” this cartoon suggests the lack of consensus after the election of 1876 could have ended in another civil war.

The result of the presidential election, ultimately, was close. Tilden won the popular vote by nearly 300,000 votes; however, he had only 184 electoral votes, with 185 needed to proclaim formal victory. Three states, Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina were in dispute due to widespread charges of voter fraud and miscounting. Questions regarding the validity of one of the three electors in Oregon cast further doubt on the final vote; however, that state subsequently presented evidence to Congress confirming all three electoral votes for Hayes.

Figure 3. Powerful Republican Party leader Roscoe Conkling is shown here as the devil. Hayes walks off with the prize of the 1876 election, the South, personified as a woman. The cartoon, drawn by Joseph Keppler, has a caption that quotes Goethe: “Unto that Power, he doth belong Which only doeth Right while ever willing Wrong.”

As a result of the disputed election, the House of Representatives established a special electoral commission to determine which candidate won the challenged electoral votes of these three states. In what later became known as the Compromise of 1877, Republican Party leaders offered southern Democrats an enticing deal. The offer was that if the commission found in favor of a Hayes victory, Hayes would order the withdrawal of the remaining U.S. troops from those three southern states, thus allowing the collapse of the radical Reconstruction governments of the immediate post-Civil War era. This move would permit southern Democrats to end federal intervention and control their own states’ fates in the wake of the end of slavery.

After weeks of deliberation, the electoral commission voted eight to seven along straight party lines, declaring Hayes the victor in each of the three disputed states. As a result, Hayes defeated Tilden in the electoral vote by a count of 185–184 and became the next president. By April of that year, radical Reconstruction, which had been limping along for several years, ended as promised, with the removal of federal troops from the final two Reconstruction states, South Carolina and Louisiana. Within a year, Redeemers—Southern Democrats resuming headship of state governments—had retaken control of the political and social fabric of the South.

Perhaps most surprising was the lack of public outrage over such a transparent compromise. The economic crisis of 1873 meant that many Northerners turned their focus away from the South and toward improving the moribund economy. Both Black civil rights and civil reform took a back seat. In an era where voter turnout remained relatively high, the two major political parties remained largely indistinguishable in their agendas as well as their propensity for questionable tactics and backroom deals. Partisanship, rather than ideological differences, governed the two-party system. Likewise, a growing belief in laissez-faire principles as opposed to reforms and government intervention (which many Americans believed contributed to the outbreak of the Civil War) led even more Americans to accept the nature of an inactive federal government.