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After the contested election of 1876, the Compromise of 1877 was an informal agreement that the Democrats would give Republican candidate Rutherford B. Hayes the presidency, so long as Hayes agreed to remove all federal troops from the South. This ended the Reconstruction era and allowed white segregationist Democrats to take over most Southern states, where they passed the strict laws that prevented virtually all Black citizens from voting until the civil rights movement in the 1960s.
Compromise of 1877 Quotes in How Democracies Die
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Chapter 6
Quotes
The norms sustaining our political system rested, to a considerable degree, on racial exclusion. The stability of the period between the end of Reconstruction and the 1980s was rooted in an original sin: the Compromise of 1877 and its aftermath, which permitted the de-democratization of the South and the consolidation of Jim Crow. Racial exclusion contributed directly to the partisan civility and cooperation that came to characterize twentieth-century American politics.
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The process of racial inclusion that began after World War II and culminated in the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act would, at long last, fully democratize the United States. But it would also polarize it, posing the greatest challenge to established forms of mutual toleration and forbearance since Reconstruction.
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Compromise of 1877 Term Timeline in How Democracies Die
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Chapter 6: The Unwritten Rules of American Politics
...parties gradually reestablished mutual toleration. However, this didn’t happen until after Reconstruction ended in the Compromise of 1877 and Henry Cabot Lodge’s legislation to protect the Black vote failed to pass in 1890....
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...antidemocratic “original sin” of racial exclusion. The two parties only got along because, after the Compromise of 1877 , they agreed to let white supremacists govern the South and disenfranchise most Black Americans....
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