AMERICA AT 250 – A BLACK RETROSPECTIVE
1876 – 1925 Jim Crow, Black Codes and Baseball
By DeWAYNE WICKHAM
It was nearly midnight on the evening of November 7, 1876 – the centennial year of this nation’ s founding – when 57-year-old Daniel Sickles hobbled into the Republican Party’ s sprawling suite in New York City’ s Fifth Avenue Hotel.
A former Democrat and Union Army major general whose right leg was amputated above the knee after being shattered by a cannonball during the Battle of Gettysburg, Sickles was now a diehard Republican. By the time he arrived at the GOP’ s election headquarters, most of the votes from the nation’ s 38 states had been counted and the chances of Rutherford B. Hayes, the Republican candidate, continuing his party’ s 16-year hold on the White House didn’ t look good.
But with the results from four states – Florida, South Carolina, Louisiana and Oregon – not yet reported, Sickles, who was awarded the Medal of Honor for his actions during the Civil War, set in motion a series of events that made the 1876 presidential election one of the most consequential of the nation’ s history.
Ultimately, in what is called the Compromise of 1877, a deal that was brokered ended Reconstruction – and began the Jim Crow Era.
Reconstruction was the label given to Congress’ s plan to bring the Confederate states back into the United States while ensuring that the people who launched the Civil War were not allowed to reassert their dominance over the formerly enslaved people. After the war, most of the country’ s five million Black people stayed in the South.
About 20,000 federal troops were sent into the South to enforce the Reconstruction policies of Congress. Protected by these soldiers, Blacks quickly became a major force in southern life. More than 2,000 were elected to political offices throughout the South during the Reconstruction period, from 1867-1877.
But the withdrawal of federal troops from the region following the 1876 presidential election brought quick – and
20