With the United States again reckoning with its treatment of Black Americans, one point bears stating plainly: the architecture of federally sanctioned racism that shaped public life from 1877 to 1954 was not the work of a single party but a joint project of the two major parties. Since 1964, Democrats have largely styled themselves as champions of civil rights.

From 1877 to 1964, however, Democrats—especially their Southern “Redeemer” wing—were the principal enforcers of racial subordination. Republicans, for their part, too often averted their gaze, acquiescing to a system they knew was being rebuilt in the South. What followed has rightly been called a “re-enslavement” in new legal dress, born of a bargain struck by Republicans and Democrats in 1877: the Compromise of 1877.

Despite pressure from party bosses and public expectation, President Ulysses S. Grant declined to seek a third term in 1876. The early Republican favorite, Representative James G. Blaine, was unable to secure the nomination. Into the breach stepped Ohio’s governor, Rutherford B. Hayes, an acceptable compromise to a divided GOP. Democrats chose New York’s Samuel J. Tilden, a reformer with a reputation for probity.

The contest that followed was among the most disputed in American history. Tilden won the popular vote—by roughly 254,000 ballots—and initially stood at 184 electoral votes to Hayes’s 165. Nineteen electoral votes from the South remained in dispute, along with one elector in Oregon. Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina each produced rival returns; both parties claimed victory and sent competing slates to Washington, precipitating a constitutional crisis neither chamber could resolve alone.

Control of Congress hardened the impasse. Democrats held the House of Representatives; Republicans held the Senate and the presidency. Each chamber possessed procedural weapons to thwart the other. The country’s political machinery ground to a halt, and with it, the perceived legitimacy of the constitutional order.

To break the stalemate, the parties agreed to a temporary Electoral Commission—an improvised mechanism layered on top of procedures far different from those that exist today. Under the constitutional framework then in force, if no candidate commanded a majority of electoral votes, the House could select a president with each state delegation casting a single vote, and a two-thirds quorum was required. The hybrid Commission, comprising senators, representatives, and justices, became the vehicle for decision-making.

The strain of that winter was palpable. In a 1893 essay in The Atlantic, Representative James Monroe of Ohio recalled tempers fraying and the threat of violence shadowing the Capitol’s corridors. Against that backdrop, the Commission voted, strictly along party lines, to award Hayes all 20 contested electoral votes.

Democrats, incensed, prepared to filibuster the final count—an act that could have detonated the peaceful transfer of power. Instead, leaders from both parties decamped to Washington’s Wormley Hotel in February 1877 and struck a private bargain.

The Republicans who gathered at Wormley were no longer the radical egalitarians who had shepherded the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. Increasingly, they were tribunes of railroad magnates and financiers alarmed by agrarian unrest in the West and a rising wave of labor militancy in the industrial Northeast, which would erupt in the Great Railroad Strike later that year. With federal subsidies curtailed after the Crédit Mobilier scandal of 1872, they were eager to restart public support for the Texas & Pacific and other grand projects, and to reassert order over labor.

Their counterparts on the Democratic side represented the Redeemer wing of the party—the planters, businessmen, and political fixers intent on reconstructing the prewar racial order under new legal cover. They had their own demands: federal aid to rebuild Southern infrastructure; flood-control projects on the great rivers; and, most of all, an end to federal “interference” in the South’s governance—from election supervision to civil-rights enforcement. They sought latitude to “deal with” Black citizens without Northern oversight.

Though never written down, the deal’s terms are clear in the historical record and were famously distilled by C. Vann Woodward in Reunion and Reaction: The Compromise of 1877 and the End of Reconstruction. Hayes would be seated as president. In return, he would withdraw the remaining federal troops from the former Confederacy—then stationed in Louisiana, South Carolina, and Florida—thus ending Reconstruction’s military backbone; appoint at least one Southern Democrat to his Cabinet (a promise realized with Tennessean David M. Key as postmaster general); support a Southern transcontinental railroad via the Texas & Pacific, a plank embedded in the “Scott Plan” pushed by Pennsylvania Railroad magnate Thomas A. Scott; and back measures to spur Southern industrialization. Embedded in the understanding was something blunter still: the South would have a wide berth to manage its “racial affairs” at home.

Redeemer Democrats pledged, in turn, to respect the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments and to protect Black citizens’ basic rights. Those assurances quickly evaporated. By the early 1880s, the South had erected a regime of poll taxes, literacy tests, all-white primaries, racial terror, and peonage that consigned African Americans to a status perilously close to slavery. State courts offered little refuge; federal courts—especially the Supreme Court, whose membership into the late 1930s reflected Republican presidential appointments—narrowed Reconstruction’s guarantees and countenanced the legal scaffolding of Jim Crow.

The counterrevolution unfolded not only in law but in daily life. The Freedmen’s Bureau had once enforced contracts, built schools, and prosecuted outrages. After the bargain, those protections thinned. Black officeholders were pushed out; voting rolls shrank; sharecropping and debt peonage locked families into generational poverty. “Separate” became governing principle and social fact: in cars and classrooms, at lunch counters and polling places.

Seen in the long view, the Wormley bargain marked a significant turning point. It ended one experiment in multiracial democracy and green-lit a decades-long campaign to erase its gains. It helped align the Republican Party with the priorities of the national capital and positioned the Democratic Party—especially in the South—as the instrument of racial hierarchy. And it left millions of Black Americans to navigate a brutal new order with scant protection from the very institutions sworn to secure their liberty.

The harvest of that compromise is not confined to textbooks. Its bitter fruit still appears on American streets—in the unequal distribution of state violence, in the architecture of disenfranchisement, in wealth and health gaps that descend directly from choices made when Reconstruction was throttled. Accountability belongs not to one party’s past but to both—and to a republic that looked away while a people were stripped of rights won, at terrible cost, only a decade before.