1877 Electoral Crisis: The Wormley Hotel Bargain Historians Now Doubt

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Samuel J. Tilden finished the 1876 election with 184 electoral votes, one short of the 185 needed, while Rutherford B. Hayes had 165, leaving 20 votes in dispute from Florida, Louisiana, South Carolina and one Oregon elector. Violence and intimidation against Black voters had produced rival governments that sent competing certificates, and the 12th Amendment did not say who decided which counted. Congress formed a 15-member Electoral Commission with seven Democrats, seven Republicans and independent Justice David Davis, but when Illinois Democrats elected Davis to the Senate he resigned, a Republican justice replaced him, and the commission voted 8 to 7 for Hayes on every dispute. House Democrats answered with dilatory tactics aimed at pushing the count past March 4 while Ulysses S. Grant reinforced Washington.

For decades the standard explanation for the filibuster's sudden collapse was C. Vann Woodward's 1951 account in Reunion and Reaction of a secret deal at Wormley's Hotel: troop withdrawal, a Southern cabinet member, Texas and Pacific Railway funding, industrial aid and Southern control of its own affairs. Allan Peskin's 1973 essay Was There a Compromise of 1877? noted the railroad and industrial measures never happened and Hayes had already promised troop removal. Michael Les Benedict credited Speaker Samuel J. Randall and Northern Democrats with ending the delay, and Greg Downs in 2012 pointed to fear of Mexicanization. Whatever the cause, Hayes withdrew the troops, Republican governments in South Carolina and Louisiana fell to Redeemer Democrats, and the Solid South took shape.

• Democrats forced pointless roll calls, refused to answer to deny a quorum, and objected to undisputed votes from Vermont and Wisconsin.
• Hayes named Southern Democrat David M. Key as postmaster general, an appointment he had planned anyway.
• Northern Democrats, not Republicans, blocked the Texas and Pacific Railway funding.
• Republicans kept introducing Southern voting rights legislation until the Lodge Bill failed in 1890.
• Taylor Branch described Harry Truman's 1948 civil rights proposal as the first from a president since that era, in effect a repeal of 1877.