After the most disputed election in American history, the Compromise of 1877 put Rutherford Hayes into office as the nation's 19th president; outraged northern Democrats derided Hayes as "His Fraudulency.". Members who were found to be part of the KKK, including politicians and officials, were prosecuted for their involvement with the hate groups. Known as the “Jim Crow laws” (after a popular minstrel act developed in the antebellum years), these segregationist statutes governed life in the South through the middle of the next century, ending only after the hard-won successes of the civil rights movement in the 1960s. The other school of thought states that the racism of the South would not allow Reconstruction to succeed. After the Civil War came to a close, the North wanted to bring the South back into the Union. Yet the Negro after his emancipation was precisely in this state of destitution. One view considers Reconstruction to have been an opportunity lost. Negotiations between Southern political leaders and representatives of Hayes produced a bargain: Hayes would recognize Democratic control of the remaining Southern states, and Democrats would not block the certification of his election by Congress (see United States presidential election of 1876). The end of Reconstruction returned control of the government in the South to the white southerners who promptly disenfranchised African-Americans. Democrats responded nationally in 1874, running on sound economics and fiscal policy, which allowed them to take control of the House of Representatives. Matt Morgen, Print of a crowd driven from Tompkins Square by the mounted police, in the Tompkins Square Riot of 1874, January 1874. When Davis refused to serve, the moderate Republican Justice Joseph Bradley was chosen to replace him. Did you know? A special electoral commission voted along party lines—eight Republicans for, seven Democrats against—in favor of Hayes. The plan that passed was that of military districts, created by Radical Republicans. The stage was set for an election that would end Reconstruction as a national issue. On the eve of the 1876 Presidential election, the nation still reeling from depression, the Grant administration found itself no longer able to intervene in the South due to growing national hostility to interference in southern affairs. During the 1870s, many Republicans retreated from both the racial egalitarianism and the broad definition of federal power spawned by the Civil War. The “Crittenden Compromise,” as it became known, included six proposed constitutional ...read more, In 1820, amid growing sectional tensions over the issue of slavery, the U.S. Congress passed a law that admitted Missouri to the Union as a slave state and Maine as a free state, while banning slavery from the remaining Louisiana Purchase lands located north of the 36º 30’ ...read more, The race for the U.S. presidency has delivered its share of hotly contested elections between the Democratic Party, Republican Party and various third-party candidates. After the death of Thaddeus Stevens in 1868 and the political alienation of Charles Sumner by 1870, Stalwart Republicans assumed primacy in Republican Party politics, putting Reconstruction on the defensive within the very party leading it.