If the Dems had won in 1876?

In My Humble Opinion
1

In 1876 the Democrats were what was left of the pro-slavery party. If they had won, is there any chance they wouldn’t have ended reconstruction? We always hear (well I always heard) that the Republicans had made this unholy deal that if they were awarded the presidency they would end reconstruction (and allow the south to institute Jim Crow). But I started thinking about that and concluded that the only thing that would have saved reconstruction would have been a resounding Republican victory.

Any historian on the board care to give an opinion on the subject?

2

Well, if Tilden had won, the Republicans would not have gone on board with ending reconstruction, and would want to campaign against the Democrats. If there were negative outcomes to the Tilden administration’s dismantling of reconstruction, the Republicans might have opted to point to it as a policy failure and made the restoration of reconstruction a campaign plank.

(I am not a historian though)

3

By 1877 Reconstruction was mostly dismantled anyway–white terrorists had seen to that. By January 1877 biracial Republican regimes held power only in Louisiana and South Carolina, and they were maintained in those states only with the support of federal troops.

If Tilden had won in 1876, there is no chance–zero, nil, cipher, naught–that he would have ordered or allowed federal troops to continue propping up the last two Southern Republican state governments. So Reconstruction was history either way.

4

That is what I suspected. When I took American history in HS, I was left with the impression that it was the compromise of 1876 that allowed the Republicans to win and reconstruction to end. This was partly due to my automatic reaction Dems = better, Reps = worse (I was born on the 3rd day of Roosevelt’s second term), but thinking about the situation recently I realized that that guy feeling was wrong and in 1876, the Dems were the party of the south.

Thanks for the answer.

5

AHunter3 makes an important point. The Hayes deal of 1876 meant that both parties were trying to end reconstruction. If Tilden had won, the Republicans would have stood by reconstruction as they had been. Its gradual demise would have still occurred but there wouldn’t have been a quick wholesale abandonment. The Democrats would have had to negotiate with the Republicans at every step along the way.

6

Again, by 1877 Reconstruction was already 99%+ abandoned. The key to ending Reconstruction wasn’t the Compromise of 1877, it was the systematic white terror campaigns of the 1870’s, which hit in two waves. The first wave, roughly 1869-71, involved the Ku Klux Klan and overturned Republican rule in Georgia and several of the border states. At that point the Grant administration had an Attorney General, Amos Akerman, who actually cared about black civil rights, and mounted a counter-attack through the military and federal courts that achieved some success, and there was a respite for a couple of years.

Then Akerman resigned, the Grant administration stopped caring, and terrorists ran wilder than ever in a second wave that hit especially in Alabama in 1874 and Mississippi in 1875. By this time the Klan was passe; robes and disguises were no longer necessary because Democratic terrorists could operate openly. Any Republican, black or white, who campaigned or attempted to vote took his life into his hands, and the two states fell predictably to Democratic governments.

In 1876 terrorists targeted the last three Republican regimes, in Florida, South Carolina, and Louisiana, using the same methods and pretty much getting the same results. They claimed victory in all three states in both the state and presidential elections. As a last desperate rearguard measure, the outgoing incumbent Republican canvassing boards in all three states threw out enough Democratic votes to give Republicans the win in the presidential election and in the Louisiana and South Carolina state elections. (They gave up the Florida state election as hopeless.)

At this point the only way to keep the last two regimes (LA and SC) going would be for (a) Hayes to win the presidential election; and (b) for Hayes to recognize the Republican state wins and back the Republican claimants in LA and SC with enough military force, and federal prosecutors, so that they could maintain law and order and collect taxes. Point B, by 1877, was a long shot. The army was getting smaller every year, and the political will to use it to sustain black civil rights was no longer there.

So the parties worked out the obvious compromise–Hayes could win the presidential election, but he would abandon the tottering republican state regimes in LA and SC, and never use the military to protect black civil rights, or interfere in elections, again. (He probably wouldn’t have done so, anyway, but Democrats wanted a formal agreement.) Southern Democrats cared way more about the state elections than Tilden; once they controlled all 11 Southern state governments, they could make sure black people never voted again–at least, not in numbers sufficient to matter. (It took a few decades for Southern governments to completely suppress the black vote via white primaries, literacy tests, and poll taxes.)

TLDR version–all the Compromise of 1877 did was pull the plug on a patient (biracial Reconstruction) that was already in a coma and on life support.