Rutherford Hayes

Rutherford Hayes is presented as a pivotal actor in the end of Reconstruction: seeking southern support in the 1877 presidential election, he agreed to withdraw Union troops from the South. The bargain helped secure his presidency but left the region to the returning planter elite, whose political ascendancy enabled renewed exclusion and repression of Black citizens.

The 1877 Political Bargain

In the account of Reconstruction, which lasted from 1865 to 1877, Northern politicians had used the Union Army to help bring about social change in the South. That effort faced a systematic backlash from the southern elite, organized under the banner of the Redeemers, who sought what they called the South’s redemption and aimed to re-create the old system.

The electoral college made the transfer of power possible through a bargain. Citizens voted for electors, who then chose the president; Hayes needed southern support among those electors. In exchange, southern leaders demanded that Union soldiers be withdrawn and the region left to its own devices. Hayes agreed, and with that support he became president and pulled out the troops.

Consequences in the South

The withdrawal marked the effective return of the pre–Civil War planter elite. After 1877, southern governments introduced poll taxes and literacy tests that systematically disenfranchised Black citizens and often poor white citizens as well. These measures helped establish a one-party regime under the Democratic Party, with much of the region’s political power concentrated in planter hands.

The political settlement also enabled the persistence of a plantation economy based on cheap labor, despite the abolition of slavery. Local political control and violence helped maintain that system. In Alabama, the 1865 Black Code had already sought to restrict labor mobility and competition; Hayes’s troop withdrawal came later, as part of the broader sequence through which federal intervention receded and the old elite reasserted control.

Place in the Book’s Argument

Hayes’s role is not developed as a personal biography or as a portrait of his motives. Rather, the episode makes presidential power legible through the institutional stakes of an election: a bargain over electoral support produced a withdrawal of federal enforcement, and that withdrawal changed who could control southern politics.

The account uses this outcome to show how political arrangements can shape economic and social life. The end of Reconstruction did not simply follow the end of the Civil War; the withdrawal of troops created room for the planter elite to restore political dominance and sustain an economic order built around cheap labor. Hayes’s decision therefore figures as a consequential threshold in the book’s explanation of how power and institutions can reproduce exclusion after formal emancipation.