The Compromise of 1877

For absolutely no reason at all, I thought we'd spend a little time talking about the Election of 1876 and it's fallout. First off, the 1870s were a WILD time in America. They're on that post-Civil War industrial economy where industry is booming - mainly because you had Robber Barons like Carnegie, Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, Vanderbilt, etc. absolutely wearing out the working class, and enabled to do so by the laissez-faire approach to business from the government (laissez-faire is a French term which means "hands-off" where the government, in this instance, just doesn't try to regulate business. If you can get some off-the-boat immigrant from Ireland to work for 10 cents an hour, do you, type of thing.)

1876 was also just three years after an economic depression hit that was so bad it was known as the Great Depression until 1929 when, uh, that one took the cake. The cause of that depression was railroads, which were the largest employer of Americans behind agriculture. Jay Cooke & Co. was the Union Army's financier during the Civil War and, when that war was over, the government made it a federal agent in financing railroad construction, and man they went nuts. After the Transcontinental Railroad was completed in 1869, Jay Cooke & Co. were behind the Northern Pacific Rail Road - a second transcontinental railway. But on September 18, 1873 they realized they had overextended themselves and declared bankruptcy. In the fallout, 89 of the country's 364 railroad companies had gone bankrupt. Within two years 18,000 businesses followed suit. Unemployment was at 14%. Railroad worker strikes swept across the US as wages were cut and working conditions suffered. 

The 1876 presidential election was just 11 years after the end of the Civil War. Republicans (and do not forget that, from the 1850s to the 1960s, the Republicans and Democrats flipped platforms) had been overseeing Reconstruction in the South, tasked with making sure Southern states complied with the Civil War Amendments, and attempting to undo the Southern "Black Codes" designed to keep the formerly-enslaved population as second-class citizens. Two years prior, in 1874, the predominantly-Southern Democrats gained control of the House of Representatives for the first time since the Civil War as the people grew weary, in part, of Reconstruction, the Republican response to the Panic of 1873, not to mention the corruption of Ulysses S. Grant's administration, and the unending corruption of Boss Tweed's Tammany Hall outfit. With the Southern Democrats in control of Congress, the Reconstruction writing was on the wall.

The presidential election of 1876 came down to New York's Samuel Tilden vs. Ohio's Rutherford B. Hayes. It wasn't apparently a great choice for the people:

This was the "what smells worse: your butt or your feet" presidential election of its day, something, perhaps, to which you may be able to relate. 369 Electoral Votes were up for grabs, meaning the winning candidate needed 185 to win. But the candidates - on their face - don't seem to have been that bad of a choice. 

On one side you had the Democrat Samuel J. Tilden, a former protégé of Martin Van Buren who went on to become governor of New York and broke up Tammany Hall as well as the "Canal Ring," - a corrupt group of politicians who had mismanaged the Erie Canal for their own personal enrichment. If anti-corruption was your single-issue, Tilden was your guy.

Republicans ran Ohio's Rutherford B. Hayes - a lawyer, devout Methodist father of three (soon-to-be four) who joined the Union Army despite being almost 40 years old when the Civil War broke out saying that he would rather die than live having done nothing for the Union. Wounded five times, he (obviously) survived the war and emerged as a Brigadier General. He was elected to the House of Representatives upon the end of the Civil War and then to be Governor of Ohio. But Black Americans assumed that a Hayes victory would mean the reinstatement of slavery.

Election Day came, and 82% of registered voters did vote - a number not since topped (though I'm keeping an eye out on the 2020 voter turnout). 4,036,298 votes were cast for Hayes. 4,300,590 were cast for Tilden. But, as we all know, that's not exactly what matters. That 264,000 vote margin resulted in a 184-165 Electoral College advantage for Tilden. One vote shy of a Tilden win. But three states were disputed: Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina. Coincidentally (or not), these were the only three Southern states controlled by Republicans. The combined total of Electoral College votes in Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina? 19. One Electoral Vote out of those three would give Tilden the presidency, while Hayes needed all 19 (Oregon was going through some stuff, but ultimately gave their one undecided Electoral Vote to Hayes, making it 284-266). 

Both sides claimed victory in the three states. Both sides alleged fraud by the other. Democrats, with their alleged 3% margin (assuming you could trust the counting of votes throughout the country), declared "Tilden or War." An article in the October 1893 issue of The Atlantic, retelling the Election of 1876, said:

Those of each party were convinced that they had gained an honest victory, and were indignant with those of the other party for denying or even doubting it. The feeling of mutual hostility had been greatly intensified by party leaders, orators, and presses. In some of our cities it took all the terrors of a police court to keep Democrats and Republicans from breaking the peace. Members of Congress who had begun by being angry on their own account, and who felt under some obligation to represent the anger of their constituents, exploded when they began to discuss the subject with their opponents, at the hotels and in the club-rooms of the city of Washington. It took quiet and sensible men some time to learn that they could gain nothing by arguing the question with those of opposite political views, and men of a different stamp never did learn it.

There's that rhyming couplet of history. 

How would Congress react? Some argued that the President of the Senate should determine the votes, since it was that position that had counted and declared the Electoral College vote since American government had been a thing. But the President of the Senate was a Republican, and Democrats would never accept a result by a Republican. Another argument was that the House of Representatives should determine the votes, since that body is where the election goes if there isn't a majority in the Electoral College. But the Democrats controlled the House, and Republicans would never accept a result by a Democrat. A third argument was to let the Supreme Court decide the election since it was, theoretically, at least, an impartial body. But seven members of the Supreme Court at that time were appointed by Republicans, and Democrats would have hollered. A "leading Democrat" (according to the 1893 article in The Atlantic) remarked on the floor of the House that "within 100 Days, people would be cutting each other's throats."

Faced with the challenge of how to deal with votes from three states neither side totally trusted, a compromise was made by the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives and the Republican-controlled Senate: create a bipartisan commission of five members from the House (three Democrats and two Republicans), five from the Senate (three Republicans and two Democrats), and five Supreme Court justices (two appointed by Democrat presidents, two appointed by Republican presidents, and one independent) called the Electoral Commission to determine how to allot the 19 remaining votes in the Electoral College. When the Joint Session of Congress began on February 1, 1877, the Electoral Commission got to work. A large crowd gathered in the gallery as the Florida returns were being counted. The New York Times wrote:

There was a great desire to witness a fair count, and curiosity was increased by the expectation that the new law would afford some new diversion to the formality of the counting.

The inner workings of the Electoral Commission can be studied more deeply by clicking on any of the above links. In the interest of Doing Something Else tonight, let's say that perhaps a deal was inevitable. Republicans wanted the presidency. Democrats wanted federal troops and federal oversight out of their states. Nicholas E. Hollis tells us about the Wormley Agreement, in which representatives of both campaigns met at Washington's Wormley Hotel - a block northeast of Lafayette Square - which was founded by James Wormley (worthy of a separate post), whose father had obtained his certificate of freedom with the help of lawyer Francis Scott Key, and turned the hotel into "an internationally-renowned hospitality business catering to the most prominent visitors and residents of the capital." At the Wormley, however, it was proposed that the three contested states - Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina - would award their votes to Hayes in exchange for Republicans agreeing to remove federal troops from those states. 

At 4:10am on the morning of March 2, 1877 - a mere two days before the inauguration of whoever won - all three states gave their Electoral Votes to Hayes, giving the Republican Hayes a 285-284 result in the 1876 Electoral College in exchange for the end of Reconstruction. Republicans sold out Black citizens for almost 100 years in exchange for four years of the presidency. What came next for Black Americans was generations of segregation, Black Codes, Plessy v. Ferguson, and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan. Again we turn to Congressman Monroe:

Again, we see how absurd has been the statement that there was fraud in the count, that somebody was cheated by the manner in which it was conducted. The simple narrative of facts which has now been given refutes such a charge. If anybody was cheated, who was it? Certainly not the Republicans; for their candidate was made President. Nor was it the Democrats; for the bill in accordance with which the electoral votes were ascertained and declared was specifically their measure. 

The cheated number was the Black community of the United States of America - who at that point had gone from "Property" to "Citizens" by a significant portion of the country in less than 12 years. Within two months of taking office, Hayes removed federal troops from surrounding the statehouses in South Carolina and Florida. Republican James Garfield won the election of 1880 by less than 10,000 votes out of over nine million ballots cast. Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina all voted for the Democratic candidate Winfield S. Hancock.

What Happened To Seneca Village

In 1821, future Vice President and 8th President Martin Van Buren led New York Democrats in a Constitutional Convention to amend the State Constitution. The outcome was the Second Constitution of New York. Among the amendments adopted was the abolition of the land-owning restrictions for white men to vote. Also adopted was a tightening of requirements for Black men to vote - holding property with a value of $250. They also had to prove they lived in New York State, and paid taxes, for three years prior to the election.

1821 also saw the founding of "the largest and wealthiest church of colored people in (New York City), perhaps in the country." The African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church rose out of Lower Manhattan's John Street Methodist Church, (est. 1766), which engaged in discrimination and segregation against Blacks, forcing several families to meet and consider their next steps. Keeping in mind that the potter's field where the AMEZ Church buried their dead was about to get repurposed into Washington Square Park, moving was becoming a necessity.

Two of the AMEZ founders were William Hamilton and James Varick. Hamilton was one of the first abolitionists in the United States, a fine orator, and suspected to be the illegitimate son of Alexander Hamilton (his mother was a freed woman of color). Varick, a Methodist minister, had been with John Street and encouraged a split in 1796, and in 1822 became AMEZ's first bishop as a debate raged within the Methodist Church over the acceptance of Black ministers. By the end of the Civil War AMEZ had over 46,000 members and was sending missionaries to the South to help the newly-freed enslaved and establish churches. Total membership in AMEZ and its satellite congregations across the country numbered over 200,000.

As AMEZ grew, so did this neighborhood near the Upper West Side, between what would have been Seventh and Eighth Avenues and 82nd and 89th Streets. Fleeing the crowded streets of Lower Manhattan, and the racism that came with it (Manhattan was a central location of the colonial slave trade), combined with the promise of land ownership, a Black shoeshiner named Andrew Williams bought three lots. Others followed suit, and in 1825 the five-acre Seneca Village was established by a group of Free Blacks, the first community of its kind in New York City. The name is rumored to have referred to anything from "Senegal" to the Roman philosopher Seneca (who advocated for individual liberty) to an Underground Railroad code word. At the time, most of New York City's residents lived in lower Manhattan, below 14th Street, so the remote north side of Manhattan had affordable land prices which were attractive to aspiring African-American landowners. There was a natural spring at Summit Rock - the highest point in what would become Central Park - that provided fresh water. There were over 250 residents of Seneca Village, over half of them property-owning Black residents. Thanks to the 1821 Constitutional Convention and the increased restrictions on how Black men could vote, Seneca Village was politically and culturally important. On July 4, 1827 New York became the first state to pass a law totally abolishing legal slavery. Seneca Village was growing. While Seneca Village contained just 1% of New York City's Black population, by 1855 it held 20% of its Black property owners and 15% of New York City's Black voters. Among these families was the Lyons family, educators and abolitionists who ran a boarding house for Black sailors that doubled as a stop on the Underground Railroad. The Lyons' daughter, Maritcha, worked in Brooklyn schools for almost 50 years and fought alongside Ida B. Wells in anti-lynching activism.

When the potato famine hit Ireland in the 1840s as political unrest in Germany unfolded, many immigrants settled in the area. Seneca Village added another AME church as well as a Catholic church. Colored School No. 3 was one of the few integrated schools in New York City. Some of the homes in Seneca Village were two-story frame houses. There was room for gardening, sometimes even a barn. At its height Seneca Village boasted 264 residents and three churches, two cemeteries, and a school. Almost a third of Seneca Village was Irish - one of the three churches was All Angels, a racially integrated congregation in which Irish immigrants worshiped alongside Free Blacks - a picture of racial harmony often unseen.

Frederick Law Olmsted was getting ready to head to Yale when he got sumac poisoning, weakening his eyesight. He went to sea for a while, became a merchant, and then turned to journalism while he settled on the family farm on the south side of Staten Island. It was as a journalist in 1850 that Olmsted traveled to England with the expressed purpose of looking at gardens, specifically Birkenhead Park near Liverpool, which had opened three years earlier and was thought to be the first publicly-funded civic park in the world. That same year, 1850, Andrew Jackson Downing, publisher of The Horticulturist, brought English architect Calvert Vaux to help him design Matthew Vassar's "Springside" estate. Olmsted would visit Downing, who had published Olmsted's essay on his visit to Birkenhead, at his estate in Newburgh, New York - 60 miles north of Manhattan, on the Hudson River. It was there that Olmsted met Vaux. Downing died in 1852 in the sinking of the steamship Henry Clay at Riverdale in The Bronx. He was in the process of designing the grounds of the Smithsonian Institution when he died. Olmsted and Vaux carried Downing's influence with them for the rest of their careers.

Newspapers rallied around the idea of a large, centrally-located municipal park within the limits of New York City, gardens similar to what you would find in London and Paris. In 1853 New York City officials began planning. The unofficial boundary of metropolitan New York City by the mid-1850s was 23rd Street, well south of Seneca Village, though New York City's population had quadrupled between 1821, the founding of AMEZ, and 1855. Initially, officials picked a spot known as Jones Wood, on the water on the Upper East Side, but white landowners had enough political pull to dissuade city officials from choosing it, asking for a further inland location. While this area of Manhattan was kinda-sorta vacant, there were over 1,600 New Yorkers living there, including the nuns of the Academy of St. Vincent, and Seneca Village. That Seneca Village was a growing Black community (and a chorus of thinly-veiled racist views that Seneca Village was on its way to becoming the next Five Points), and that the residents of Seneca Village didn't have the same political pull as the Upper East Siders, didn't help their cause. Seneca Village was cast as a "wasteland" inhabited by "squatters" who lived in "shanties." It was far enough away from metropolitan New York City that most New Yorkers didn't bother to run uptown and see for themselves.

The New York Commercial-Advertiser wrote:
Give us a park, be it central, or sidelong, here, there, anywhere...a real park, a large park.

City officials settled on a site  On July 21, 1853 - 51 weeks after Andrew Jackson Downing's death - the Central Park Act was passed, in which the New York State Legislature set aside 778 acres of land between Fifth and Eighth Avenues and 59th and 106th Streets in central Manhattan to create the nation's first major landscaped public space (it would be extended four blocks north to 110th Street a few years later), which would be known as Central Park. The "socially-conscious" types figured that a massive park such as this would contribute to the well-being of New York society, in public health and in a progressive civil society. 17,000 potential building sites were removed from the real estate market.

Most New York City newspapers cheered the removal of "the insects" from Seneca Village. The N-Word was used. Not all were in favor, though. Social reformer Hal Guernsey wrote:
Will anyone pretend the park is not a scheme to enhance the value of uptown land, and create a splendid center for fashionable life, without regard to, and even in dereliction of, the happiness of the multitude upon whose hears and hands the expenses will fall?

Still, the City had to obtain that land legally, or at least something approaching legality. Enter Eminent Domain. The Just Compensation Clause in the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution provides, "Nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation." And "Just Compensation" indicates fair market value should be paid to the landowners. This was the justification used by New York City officials in razing Seneca Village (and other, smaller neighborhoods) to build Central Park. It didn't hurt that popular opinion had been swayed by newspaper owners and editors dead set on "modernizing" New York City, even if it meant tearing down a more modern version of America: that of a successful Black neighborhood featuring landowning freemen before the Civil War.

In June 1856, New York City mayor Fernando Wood (a Tammany Hall man who was a central figure in the Gangs of New York-famous Dead Rabbits/Bowery Boys Election Day fight) initiated a contest judged by a board headed by Washington Irving. Olmsted, already the superintendent of the Park's work force, and Vaux worked together on their plan, submitted it to the board, and won, beating out 32 other proposals.. Olmsted and Vaux called it Greensward, "for their preferred landscapes of sweeping meadows and vast water bodies designed to appear limitless, while brilliantly belying the Park's long and narrow rectangle within New York City's rigid grid."

The residents of New York City that found themselves firmly within the boundary of Central Park petitioned the courts for two years to save their homes, churches, and schools. Ultimately in 1857 the 1600 residents, including all of Seneca Village, were paid (evicted) from their homes to build Central Park. One newspaper wrote that the Seneca Village police raid would "not be forgotten...as many a brilliant and stirring fight was had during the campaign. But the supremacy of the law was upheld by the policeman's bludgeons."

Olmsted wrote that Central Park was "of great importance as the first real Park made in this country - a democratic development of the highest significance." It was one of the first examples of Urban Renewal, "reinvigorating" a Black neighborhood targeted for destruction for the purpose of the betterment of the elite. There are no known records of what happened to the eternal residents of Seneca Village's two cemeteries.

Click here for an interactive map of Seneca Village.