Compromise of 1877 in the context of "1876 United States presidential election"

The Radical Republicans were a political faction within the Republican Party originating from the party's founding in 1854—some six years before the Civil War—until the Compromise of 1877, which effectively ended Reconstruction. They called themselves "Radicals" because of their goal of immediate, complete, and permanent eradication of slavery in the United States. The Radical faction also included strong currents of nativism, anti-Catholicism, and support for the prohibition of alcoholic beverages. These policy goals and the rhetoric in their favor often made it extremely difficult for the Republican Party as a whole to avoid alienating large numbers of American voters of Irish Catholic, German, and other White ethnic backgrounds. In fact, even German-American Freethinkers and Forty-Eighters who, like Hermann Raster, otherwise sympathized with the Radical Republicans' aims, fought them tooth and nail over prohibition. They later became known as "Stalwarts".

The Radicals were opposed during the war by the Moderate Republicans (led by President Abraham Lincoln), and by the Democratic Party. Radicals led efforts after the war to establish civil rights for former slaves and fully implement emancipation. After unsuccessful measures in 1866 resulted in violence against former slaves in the former rebel states, Radicals pushed the Fourteenth Amendment for statutory protections through Congress. They opposed allowing ex-Confederate politicians and military veterans to retake political power in the Southern U.S., and emphasized equality, civil rights and voting rights for the "freedmen", i.e., former slaves who had been freed during or after the Civil War by the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment.

Moderate Republicans were a faction of American politicians within the Republican Party from the party's founding before the American Civil War in 1854 until the end of Reconstruction in the Compromise of 1877. They were known for their loyal support of President Abraham Lincoln's war policies and opposed the more militant stances advocated by the Radical Republicans. According to historian Eric Foner, congressional leaders of the faction were James G. Blaine, John A. Bingham, William P. Fessenden, Lyman Trumbull, and John Sherman. Their constituencies were primarily residents of states outside New England, where Radical Republicanism garnered insufficient support. They included "Conservative Republicans" and the moderate Liberal Republicans, later also known as "Half-Breeds".

During the 1864 United States presidential election, amidst the backdrop of the ongoing Civil War, moderate Republicans supported merging the Republican Party with the War Democrats (Democrats who supported the continuation of the Union war effort) to form the National Union Party alliance. At the Republican National Convention (which operated under the name of the "National Union National Convention" that year), they spearheaded the effort to replace Lincoln's vice president Hannibal Hamlin with Tennessee Democrat Andrew Johnson, acting out of the belief that placing a War Democrat on the presidential ticket would solidify support to ensure Lincoln's re-election.

The Solid South was the electoral voting bloc for the Democratic Party in the Southern United States between the end of the Reconstruction era in 1877 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In the aftermath of the Compromise of 1877 and the failure of the Lodge Bill of 1890, Southern Democrats disenfranchised nearly all blacks in all the former states of the Confederate States of America during the late 19th century and the early 20th century.

During this period, the Democratic Party controlled southern state legislatures and most local, state and federal officeholders in the South were Democrats. This resulted in a one-party system, in which a candidate's victory in Democratic primary elections was tantamount to election to the office itself. White primaries were another means that the Democrats used to consolidate their political power, excluding blacks from voting.

Three events in American political history have been called a corrupt bargain: the 1824 United States presidential election, the Compromise of 1877, and Gerald Ford's 1974 pardon of Richard Nixon. In all cases, Congress or the President acted against the most clearly defined legal course of action at the time, although in no case were the actions illegal. Two cases involved the resolution of indeterminate or disputed electoral votes from the United States presidential election process, and the third involved the controversial use of a presidential pardon. In all three cases, the president so elevated served a single term, or singular vacancy, and either did not run again or was not reelected when he ran.

In the 1824 election, without an absolute majority winner in the Electoral College, the 12th Amendment dictated that the outcome of the presidential election be determined by the House of Representatives. Then Speaker of the House — and low-ranked presidential candidate in that same election — Henry Clay gave his support to John Quincy Adams, the candidate with the second-most votes. Adams was granted the presidency, and then proceeded to select Clay to be his Secretary of State. In the 1876 election, accusations of corruption stemmed from officials involved in counting the necessary and hotly contested electoral votes of both sides, in which Rutherford B. Hayes was elected by a congressional commission. In the 1974 event, Ford, who had been appointed by Nixon, became president when Nixon resigned, and gave Nixon clemency.