The correct answer is: "the Compromise of 1877"
The legacy of President Hayes was limited, to a large extent, to closing the Reconstruction project, with the withdrawal of the last federal troops from Florida, Louisiana and South Carolina, precisely the three states in which the Republicans had been able to challenge the results so irregularly. This federal withdrawal allowed the southern states to institutionalize in the following years the segregation of blacks and the supremacy of the white population that would last until the 1960s. The promises of complete emancipation and real equality of the blacks released by Lincoln, who had been a commitment of the Republican Party until then, were archived forever. Hayes's decision to end Reconstruction responded to the so-called Commitment of 1877, by which the new president agreed to "make peace with the south," which translated into allowing former confederate states to do so as well as reinstating them in the Union, in exchange for the consummation of the electoral fraud that had taken him to the White House. The debt contracted by the Republicans with whom they had been allowed to take over the presidency in such irregular conditions, and the desire for national reconciliation, to turn the page to the Civil War by admitting the last states that remained outside the Union, weighed more than the rights of the black population liberated from slavery. The Civil War was definitely behind, but in return, Lincoln's party had just shielded the power of white supremacists.
