Extra Credit Questions

[Wild Bill]

The Wormley House hotel is most famous in US History as where the North and South met in 1877 and agreed to end Reconstruction with the South supposedly getting the US troops withdrawn from interfering in Southern elections thus abandoning the Blacks to their fate as second class citizens and the North getting Rutherford B. Hayes elected peacefully to the Presidency. This was accomplished because many so-called Southern Democrats were actually pre-Civil War Whigs and wanted in on the Great Barbecue of economic development that ensued. Hayes was elected by a "neutral" commission of 15 which by a vote of 8 to 7 determined which way Southern state electoral votes would go, Republican or Democrat. Hayes won by 1 electoral vote against Samuel Tilden, the Demo reform candidate out of New York State. And you thought that the election of 2000 was crooked?! Hayes was known by several nicknames like "Rutherfraud," or "ol' 8 to 7" as disgusted Northern Democrats called him. He served only one term. Radical Republicans got James A Garfield elected in 1880 but he was assassinated before he could restore any Black civil rights. The race to Jim Crow (segregation) was on, becoming installed finally by the 1890s when the Lodge Force Act failed in Congress. It took until 1965 to restore Black civil rights, the era of the 1960s becoming known as the Second Reconstruction.