The Compromise Of Seventy-Seven And Its Impact On American History

When the next election for president came in the year eighteen seventy-six, the nation was plunged into more political conflict in the Electoral college, which needed to be compromised on to determine who the nation’s next president would be. Rutherford B. Hayes, the Republican candidate, was running against Samuel Tilden, the Democratic candidate, but the election needed a compromise. The Democrats agreed that, with a few promised concessions, they would give their remaining electoral votes to Rutherford Hayes, letting the Republicans win, and making Hayes the new president of the United States. The Compromise of eighteen seventy-seven had a negative political, social, and economic impact on the reconstruction era foundation in the south,

which resulted in the movement for equal rights among all races, or better known to most people as the Civil Rights Movement.
The era of Reconstruction is the era that spawned into existence as a result from the so called “black codes”, which restricted the labor and movement of African American labor in the South. The citizens in the North despised the approach of Presidential Reconstruction, which led to more support for the Republican Party’s more radical wing. When the era of Radical Reconstruction started, it was the first time in American history that African Americans had any voice in the government, this was flipped back again after radical groups such as the Ku Klux Klan formed.
The Compromise of eighteen seventy-seven had a very large impact on racial equality in the United States history.

During the era of Reconstruction, one of the closest election in the nation’s history, but also one of the most controversial, occured. Rutherford B. Hayes won the election by one electoral vote, but lost the popular vote to Samuel Tilden by two hundred sixty-four thousand, two hundred ninety-two votes. As Rutherford says himself to the people at a train station in columbus, “I understand very well that possibly next week I may be with you again to resume my place in the Governor’s office and as your fellow

citizen.”
The states of the South wanted Reconstruction to come to an end, so they asked for a few things for the promise of if he withdrew federal troops from the south, provided federal funding for improvements in the south, and name a prominent southerner to the cabinet. The Republicans agreed to do this if elected, so Florida voted Republican in the election, which gave the Republicans the victory.
On the day of which the results were announced to the Senate, the National Republican says that the president of the convention said to abstain from any marks of approval or disapproval. The results were announced that Hayes had earned one hundred eighty-five of the electoral votes, and Tilden had earned one hundred eighty-four. One officer hissed, while at the same time, another officer clapped. The crowd surged forward, thus ending the hardest fought presidential victory in the United States of America’s history.
Tilden did not think that there was any personal wrong in the transactions that took place.
I disclaim any thought of the personal wrong involved in this transaction. Not by any act or word of mine shall that be dwarfed or degraded into a personal grievance, which is, in truth, the greatest wrong that has stained our national annals. To every man of the four and a quarter millions who were defrauded of the fruits of their elective franchise it is as great a wrong as it is to me. And no less to every man of the minority will the ultimate consequences extend. Evils in government grow by success and by impunity. They do not arrest their own progress. They can never be limited except by external forces.

Part of the controversy of the deal was that in Florida, some of the residents resorted to violence to keep blacks from voting, so that they would not change the outcome of the election in the state. The Republicans resorted to fraud, which the Democrats countered be intimidating Black voters.
In Florida, the election made things so tense, that some counties were guarded by armed men, so that the government could not collect the votes from those counties. There was also violence in South Carolina in the elections from eighteen seventy-four to eighteen seventy-seven.
In the December before the election, Henry Van Ness Boynton detailed what was occuring in Washington D.C. at the time,
It looks to me now as if enough Southern men could be induced to so declare themselves on the floor upon the general policy, as to give us the balance of power in the House at the time of the Joint Convention. It is not necessary that all who vote “no” Should place themselves where they would be even apparently acting with republicans. They could place their whole action upon the statement that by no act of theirs should the party with which they are connected adopt revolutionary measures.

The author Keith Ian Polakoff states, “It is evident that Boynton, Smith, Garfield, and even Hayes were thinking about a second, long-range objective in addition to smoothing the way for a Republican succession.”
Congress made a fifteen man commission in January of eighteen seventy-seven to try to decide to whom the disputed states electoral votes would go to.

All three states were voted in Hayes favor by eight to seven. Little documentation of this commision was ever taken, so it is hard to find much more evidence for it. At this same time, other members of Congress tried to come up with a solution to break the tension between the sides of the election. The Republicans promised that, if elected, they would remove troops from the South. Hayes did this, which ended the era of Reconstruction, and the Republicans effort to protect African Americans. This brought upon the Jim Crow segregation in the South. This made it hard for the Republicans to support African American equality in the South. When the troops were in the South, they were really just there to protect African Americans rights, so many white southerners hated the troops presence.

The reason for which Hayes won the election was that both sides wanted it to end, so the Democrats agreed to elect Hayes on the conditions that he would withdraw the remaining federal troops that still occupied the South, provide the South with federal funding to help rebuild, and to name a prominent Southern Democrat to the president’s cabinet. The Republicans agreed to provide these concessions if they would give their electoral votes to Hayes. Hayes did actually accomplish these tasks during his term in the presidential

office.
Once the troops were out of the South, they could no longer protect African American rights, so that started racial segregation, and the disenfranchisement of black voters.
The final results were so unexpected, that Rutherford Birchard Hayes found out that he won through telegram on a train, and made last minute plans for a party after the news got out.
The effects of the Compromise of eighteen seventy-seven are very apparent in today's society, and how it ended up taking away many peoples rights. Once the troops were removed from the South, Jim Crow laws were placed in the region. Jim Crow laws are any of the laws that permitted racial segregation, which is what started the movement for civil rights among minorities. The laws passed segregated the public transportation and school systems. The Civil Rights movement was the movement in the nineteen-fifties and the nineteen-sixties for equal rights among minorities in the United States of America. The United States government passed the Civil Rights Act of nineteen fifty-seven, which made it against the law for a local government to attempt to stop someone's ability, or right to vote. There are still groups formed by minorities to have more equal rights among them.
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People , NAACP for short, is the oldest of the many current equal rights organizations, they are currently working to get more of the minorities to vote in elections, so that they can play their part.
A more recently formed equal rights organization is the Black Lives Matter movement, it was organized after the murder of Trayvon Martin. There are currently more than forty chapters. They are fighting for equal treatment from the United States government, and for the ending of racism in the U.S. police system, which on average arrests more African-Americans than whites in the country.
Another modern organization is Color of Change. Color of Change fights for equal treatment from the government towards the minorities in the United States of America. They fight for equality in the court, media, prisons, and freedom of speech. The organization started in September of the year two thousand five, three weeks after the hurricane, Hurricane Katrina, hit the states in the Gulf of Mexico. The government took less efforts to help the minorities in need of help, so this movement formed to help. The recently have been encouraging minorities to vote in elections so that their voices can be heard and recognized to political figures.
The effects from the Compromise of eighteen seventy seven are still very apparent today. These effects are still extremely prevalent among the many movements fighting for equal treatment from the government towards the minorities among the citizens of the United States.