Compromise Of 1877 Quotes

We must conclude with a troubling caveat, however. 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. The “solid South” emerged as a powerful conservative force within the Democratic Party, simultaneously vetoing civil rights and serving as a bridge to Republicans. Southern Democrats’ ideological proximity to conservative Republicans reduced polarization and facilitated bipartisanship. But it did so at the great cost of keeping civil rights—and America’s full democratization—off the political agenda.

DeBow’s Review noted with contempt. “It is a melancholy exemplification of the facility with which a philanthropist, who devotes himself exclusively to the eradication of one form of evil, can deceive himself, and come to regard any means justifiable, in the pursuance of a supposed good end,” the reviewer said. “That subtle analyst of character, Nathaniel Hawthorne, has ably dissected this species of delusion in the Blithedale romance.” He recommended that Stowe

White supremacist paramilitary organizations allied with the Democratic Party practiced intimidation, violence and assassinations to repress and prevent blacks exercising their civil and voting rights in elections from 1868 through the mid-1870s. Black voting decreased markedly under such pressure, and white Democrats regained political control of southern legislatures and governors' offices in the 1870s. As a result of a national compromise related to the presidency, the federal government withdrew its forces from the South in 1877.

There is no longer any denying that this country is in the throes of a historic national crisis. Its ramifications are so vast and frightening that even now, shocked into numbness and disbelief, the American people have not yet fully grasped what is happening to them. The grim data are clear enough and still coming in. Since this summer began, thirty of our cities, big and small, have been wracked by racial dis-order; scores of citizens, almost all of them black, have been killed, thousands injured, and even more arrested. Property damage has exceeded a billion dollars; total income loss is incalculable. As a people, we are not unaccustomed to violence. Frontier lawlessness, Southern vigilante-ism, Chicago gangsterism : these are images and themes embedded in the American tradition. We have only just lost a President to an assassin's bullet. But, having escaped the bombs of two world wars, we are not familiar with the horror of burned-out buildings, smoking rubble, tanks in our streets, the blasts of Molotov cocktails, the ring of snipers' bullets from rooftops. Today we look at sections of Detroit and think of war-torn Berlin. We see rampaging, looting mobs and think of the unstable politics of underdeveloped countries. A nation's identity has been overturned. In our own history we can find no precedent in this century for the massive destruction the past three years have brought to our cities—no precedent since the Civil War. But the greatest toll is not in property damage or even in lives lost. Nor is the greatest danger that the violence will go on in-definitely, any more than the Civil War did. It is that the aftermath of that war will be repeated, that as in the Compromise of 1877 the country will turn its back on the Negro, on the root causes of his discontent, on its own democratic future.

What, to the Slave, is the Fourth of July?” Douglass trenchantly asked in 1852. “To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants brass fronted impudence; your shout of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanks-givings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.

And the black abolitionist James McCune Smith noted that even if Congress passed a constitutional amendment forbidding slavery, “the word slavery will, of course be wiped from the statute book, but the ‘ancient relation’ can be just as well maintained by cunningly devised laws.

the constitutional amendment that abolished slavery also managed to perpetuate the fatal compromise of the Constitution, which had counted the slave as only three-fifths of a person, and that is no person at all.

No is the wildest word we consign to the language,

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.

On a different plane there were the less idealistic, less publicized aims of Northern policy during the war and the period following. These aims centered in the protection of a sectional economy and numerous privileged interests, and were reflected in new statutes regarding taxes, money, tariffs, banks, land, railroads, subsidies, all placed upon the law books while the South was out of the Union.

There was something else at stake, and it was probably of more consequence in the long run than any of the previous considerations. This was the question of whether the country could regain the ability to settle Presidential elections without the resort to force.

If state rights and laissez faire meant an end to force bills, removal of Federal troops from Southern state capitals, and abandonment of intervention in local politics and race discriminations, the South was for them strong. On the other hand the South had no patience with state rights and laissez faire if they implied abandonment of Federal subsidies, loans of credit, and internal improvements. Of these the South believed she had not had anything like her just share and she meant to have a lot more.

Despite its professed radicalism, the Republican party had obviously become the conservative party, spokesman of vested interests and big business, defender of an elaborate system of tariffs, subsidies, currency laws, privileged banks, railroads, and corporations, a system entrenched in the law by Republicans while the voters were diverted by oratory about Reconstruction, civil rights, and Southern atrocities.

Lamar related the Texas & Pacific bill to the national political crisis by presenting it as a means of “reconciliation” between the sections, “material reconstruction” of the South, and a way of restoring “mutual respect and affection” at a moment when those sentiments were desperately needed.

It is substantially a proposition,” concluded the two Northern Democrats and three Republicans, who signed the Minority Report on the bill, “to build this road and the branches on Government credit without making them the property of the Government when built. If there be any profit, the corporations may take it; if there be loss, the Government must bear it.

Two events were critical in this regard. The first was the infamous Compromise of 1877, which ended the 1876 presidential election dispute and elevated Republican Rutherford B. Hayes to the presidency in exchange for a promise to remove federal troops from the South. The pact effectively ended Reconstruction, which, by stripping away hard-fought federal protections for African Americans, allowed southern Democrats to undo basic democratic rights and consolidate single-party rule.

In March 1877, Republican Rutherford B. Hayes became the nineteen president of the United States. The hell that followed was the seeds of Jim Crow beginning to sprout with Democrats and Republicans enabling more white terror. As agreed on in the Compromise of 1877, federal troops abandoned the South. Democrats tightened their hold on the former Confederacy. Reconstruction, a time designed to repair the nation after war, was a closed chapter. It wasn’t only slavery that led to Black America starting from behind the rest of the nation; it was the Democratic and Republican failure of Reconstruction.