What was the deal made to elect Rutherford B. Hayes president?

Answer 1

In the American presidential election of 1877, Rutherford B. Hayes struck a deal with Southern Democrats that enabled him to achieve the presidency. In return for their electoral votes (which would give him the needed majority), Hayes agreed to remove Federal occupation-troops from South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana -- and thereby practically put an end to Reconstruction in those states.

Answer 2

The supposed deal is usually called "the Compromise of 1877".

There was, in fact, no "deal" made to make Hayes President. The only deal was a perfectly legal & reasonable compromise-- the 1877 agreement by Congress as a whole to appoint a committee to determine which sets of conflicting electoral slates should be accepted. (These conflicting slates were mostly the result of massive vote fraud & voter intimidation by Democrats in several Southern states.) The agreement was that Congress would then ratify the committee's work, which is what they eventually did.

The committee consisted of five Congressmen, five Senators and five judges. The original split was seven Democrats and seven Republicans with one judge all considered "independent". But when Democrats suddenly chose this judge as a Senator he decided he should step off the committee; the only judge left was a Republican -- and all its votes ended up 8-7 in favor of the pro-Hayes electors.

(Interesting bit of the story most overlook is that the idea of electing the independent judge as Senator was a strategy suggested by the nephew of Democratic Presidential candidate Samuel Tilden, in the hopes it would sway his vote on the committee toward Tilden!)

But, as it turned out, when the outcome of the committee's work was becoming obvious, a handful of Democrats in Congress, unhappy with the outcome, attempted to filibuster the final vote to accept the committee's report, hoping to delay it till AFTER inauguration day. (In fact, that vote did not take place until March 3, the day before inauguration day!)

To 'defang' this filibuster, Republican representatives met with Southern Democrats most favorable to Hayes (those who had once been Southern Whigs, with similar views on many things to the Northern Whigs who were a major component of the Republican party) to assure them of Hayes positions on a number of items -- ALL of which reiterated and were consistent with the party's 1876 platform & Hayes's stated positions in his letter accepted the nomination. (That is, there was NO corrupt bargain to vote for the committee's report -- something Congress had already agreed it would accept anyway!)

Unfortunately, after the Inauguration some disgruntled Democrats began to charge that a corrupt bargain had been made, and popular history has often repeated this claim about a supposed "Compromise of 1877".

In recent times, the main item focused on as a part of the alleged compromise, was Hayes's removing the last remaining army troops from two Southern capitols, thus leaving Southern blacks at the mercy of Southern Democrats... and so "abandoning the freedman" and bringing an end to Reconstruction. In fact, Reconstruction had ALREADY fallen apart since Northerners (in the throes of an economic depression) were no longer willing to expend blood & money on such efforts in the South. Even Grant was acknowledging the practical necessity of pulling back, and Hayes had made clear his own intent to accept "home rule" in these states. At the same time, he urged these states (including in his Inaugural Address) to guard the rights of the freedmen (to vote, etc), and believed he had their agreement to do so. (To some degree he did -- it was some years before the South began to move against the rights of blacks with a spate of new "Jim Crow" laws.)

(There are some ironic blind spots in those who angrily decry a supposed "corrupt bargain". They first tend to slide by the known fact of massive Democratic fraud in the South -- such as stuffing ballot boxes -- and voter intimidation that kept many blacks away from the polls and suddenly turned many Republican districts to Democratic ones. And, on the matter of black rights -- while Hayes actions followed the GOP platform of that year, the Democratic platform simply called for removing troops with no support for or guarantees of the rights of blacks. Thus, if Tilden had been elected and followed his party's platform, the plight of this group would have been no better, and probably would have been worse, than under Hayes.