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" Kindly Doc Maddow kicked off her show last night with a long -- and long overdue -- history lesson about the white-supremacist/eliminationist tradition in the embrace of which ol&amp;#039; Cliven Bundy hurled himself. She traced it back to the passage of the Posse Comitatus Act during Reconstruction by which federal troops were removed from the states formerly in rebellion, thereby opening the door to the American apartheid that took another century for the country to shake off, and linked it to the posse comitatus movement in the 1970s and 1980s, and then tracing it forward to the troops currently gathered on Freeloader Ridge. She did, however, miss one important historical detail that resonates a bit through 21st century American politics. The Posse Comitatus Act came out of a compromise struck to settled the bitterly contested 1876 presidential election between Republican candidate Rutherford B. Hayes and Democratic candidate Samuel Tilden. After the Civil War in the period known as Reconstruction federal laws were enacted further restricting the rights of the now defeated rebels. The military was sent to the Southern states in order to perform policing duties. In the election of 1876 -- the infamous contested election between Democrat Samuel Tilden and Republican Rutherford B. Hayes -- U.S. soldiers were ordered to protect the rights of black freedmen during the election. Southern Democrats claimed that in three states they truly won the military blocked their voters from voting--or scared them into voting for Hayes. Republicans said that the military merely helped black people cast ballots without intimidation. In a deal ending the controversy, Democrats agreed to concede victory to Hayes in return for the withdrawal of the military from the Southern states, among other demands. Republicans agreed. The &amp;quot;compromise&amp;quot; was struck as a result of a 15-member commission that had been appointed by Congress instead of allowing the constitutional process of settling contested presidential elections to go forward in the House of Representatives. (Think of it as the Simpson-Bowles Commission of its time.) This may be the greatest argument against the Gatherings of Wise Men theory of democracy that you can cite. And, as we know all too well, jerry-rigged solutions to contested presidential elections never, ever,&amp;amp;lt; target=&amp;quot;_blank&amp;quot;&amp;amp;gt; turn out well. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a31159/posse-comitatus-act-042514/>