The federal government abandoned Black citizens to secure Hayes’s presidency

Evidence

“Tyranny is a central theme of American history,” the historian David Brion Davis writes in his 2006 book, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World, and “racial exploitation and racial conflict have been part of the DNA of American culture.” So, too, is the belief, articulated by Lincoln, that Black people constitute the obstacle to national unity. The many gains of Reconstruction were met with widespread and coordinated white resistance, including unthinkable violence against the formerly enslaved, wide-scale voter suppression, electoral fraud, and even, in extreme cases, the violent overthrow of democratically elected biracial governments. Faced with this violent recalcitrance, the federal government once again settled on Black people as the problem and decided that for unity’s sake, it would leave the white South to its own devices. In 1877, President Rutherford B. Hayes, in order to secure a compromise with Southern Democrats that would grant him the presidency in a contested election, agreed to pull the remaining federal troops from the South. With the troops gone, white Southerners quickly went about eradicating the gains of Reconstruction. The systemic white suppression of Black life proved so severe that this period between the 1880s and the early twentieth century became known as the second slavery or the Great Nadir, a phrase taken from the work of the historian and public intellectual Rayford W. Logan. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 153

Categorization

• XREF: Directly illustrates the reader’s ‘deviation vs design’ frame: the Compromise of 1877 shows racial accommodation treated as a fix for sectional disunity, not a deviation from it.
• SEED: An essay could trace how ‘Black people as the obstacle to national unity’ — the Lincoln-framed belief — recurs in American political rhetoric across 150 years.
• ADDENDUM: Related to the ‘origin stories are infrastructure’ reading purpose: Hayes’s compromise is a concrete origin point for the Nadir that reframes post-Reconstruction white supremacy as federal design, not Southern deviation.