The Actual Most Important Election in the History of the Country
The election we've been reliving it ever since.
Back in the days of Lincoln when the Republicans represented this country’s political left, there was an even lefty-er faction called the Radical Republicans. During the Civil War, the Radicals battled moderates, fought for emancipation, and criticized Lincoln for being too soft on the Confederacy. After the War, they’d taken control of Congress and sent federal troops into the South to protect newly-freed Black citizens.
The troops were sent in not only to ward off the KKK but the many other white supremacist paramilitary groups, as well. The Red Shirts, for example, were a death squad led by former enslaver-of-thousands and Confederate General Wade Hampton III. They killed 150 Black people in South Carolina in an attempt to stop the Black vote.
Even so, before long more than half a million Southern Black men were registered to vote, which led to over 2,000 Black men being elected to public office. I specify men because women didn’t get that right until 1920, which is its own wild story of white supremacy that I covered here.
Now, contrary to popular belief, party affiliation didn’t necessarily dictate views on slavery. It was much more of a slave-state/free-state thing. There were Southern members of both parties who were pro-slavery and Northern members of both parties who were for emancipation. This is why the presidential election of 1876 was a contest between two anti-slavery candidates: New York Democrat Samuel J. Tilden and Ohio Republican Rutherford B. Hayes.
Hayes was the perfect candidate. He’d been a lawyer with a reputation for defending Black people who’d escaped slavery. He was also a Civil War hero. He’d been a member of Congress and three-term Governor of Ohio. And, at least on views of Black people and slavery, Hayes was aligned with the Radicals. As governor, he’d given Black men voting rights in the state and he ran for president on making the country a multi-racial society.
Despite all that, Hayes lost the popular vote. And the electoral vote was disputed.
But that wasn’t the only contested election of 1876. The race for South Carolina Governor had ended not only with both candidates claiming to have won, but each behaving as though they’d won. Both sides claimed to control the state legislature. Both sides collected taxes, formed militias and passed laws. The Republican candidate was lawyer Daniel Chamberlain from Massachusetts. And the Democrat was the previously mentioned death squad leader Wade Hampton III. The numbers were slightly in Hampton’s favor, which Democrats had achieved through intimidation, stuffing ballot boxes and, of course, mass murder. The dual government went on for four months, until the Hayes struck the Corrupt Bargain with the white supremacist Democrats.
The Corrupt Bargain was that in exchange for Democrats giving up on the presidency, Hayes would remove the federal troops from the South, ending Reconstruction.
Hayes took the deal.
That’s right! The man who’d spent decades bellowing at anyone who’d listen about building a multi-racial society sold out Black people en masse the second his own power was threatened.
Without armed protection, Chamberlain conceded the South Carolina Governorship to white supremacist madman Wade Hampton. And, as you probably know, white supremacists took over the South again and Black Codes and Jim Crow laws disenfranchised Black people, spreading like a treatable, yet deliberately neglected cancer—but not just in the South. White people started sundown towns at the first sight of a Black person in at least 35 states.
Even though, technically the exact laws were taken off the books, Jim Crow continues even now to be a plague across the entire country. It brought us methods of disenfranchisement like the City Manager form of government (which I cover at length in the 99 Years podcast), the Christian Right and that one forgotten time the country collapsed into fascism. Of course, it should go without saying that other Jim Crow relics like voter restriction laws, racist housing policies, discriminatory lending and school segregation have never gone away. In fact, they’re all on the rise.
So, the next time you hear about “The Most Important Election in the History of the Country” remember the election of Rutherford B. Hayes, the Corrupt Bargain of 1877 and how we’ve been needlessly and repeatedly suffering from the results ever since.
https://samuelj.substack.com/p/the-13th-and-the-19th
https://www.axios.com/2024/05/14/school-segregation-brown-eudcation-ruling-70th
https://justice.tougaloo.edu/sundown-towns/using-the-sundown-towns-database/state-map/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Jim_Crow_law_examples_by_state#Massachusetts
https://samuelj.substack.com/p/the-missing-white-children
https://samuelj.substack.com/p/americas-forgotten-collapse-into