Surviving a World Gone Gray

By Nicholas Eberstadt

November/December 2024Published on October 10, 2024

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Although few yet see it coming, humans are about to enter a new era of history. Call it “the age of depopulation.” For the first time since the Black Death in the 1300s, the planetary population will decline. But whereas the last implosion was caused by a deadly disease borne by fleas, the coming one will be entirely due to choices made by people.

With birthrates plummeting, more and more societies are heading into an era of pervasive and indefinite depopulation, one that will eventually encompass the whole planet. What lies ahead is a world made up of shrinking and aging societies. Net mortality—when a society experiences more deaths than births—will likewise become the new norm. Driven by an unrelenting collapse in fertility, family structures and living arrangements heretofore imagined only in science fiction novels will become commonplace, unremarkable features of everyday life.

Human beings have no collective memory of depopulation. Overall global numbers last declined about 700 years ago, in the wake of the bubonic plague that tore through much of Eurasia. In the following seven centuries, the world’s population surged almost 20-fold. And just over the past century, the human population has quadrupled.

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The last global depopulation was reversed by procreative power once the Black Death ran its course. This time around, a dearth of procreative power is the cause of humanity’s dwindling numbers, a first in the history of the species. A revolutionary force drives the impending depopulation: a worldwide reduction in the desire for children.

So far, government attempts to incentivize childbearing have failed to bring fertility rates back to replacement levels. Future government policy, regardless of its ambition, will not stave off depopulation. The shrinking of the world’s population is all but inevitable. Societies will have fewer workers, entrepreneurs, and innovators—and more people dependent on care and assistance. The problems this dynamic raises, however, are not necessarily tantamount to a catastrophe. Depopulation is not a grave sentence; rather, it is a difficult new context, one in which countries can still find ways to thrive. Governments must prepare their societies now to meet the social and economic challenges of an aging and depopulating world.

In the United States and elsewhere, thinkers and policymakers are not ready for this new demographic order. Most people cannot comprehend the coming changes or imagine how prolonged depopulation will recast societies, economies, and power politics. But it is not too late for leaders to reckon with the seemingly unstoppable force of depopulation and help their countries succeed in a world gone gray.

A SPIN OF THE GLOBE

Global fertility has plunged since the population explosion in the 1960s. For over two generations, the world’s average childbearing levels have headed relentlessly downward, as one country after another joined in the decline. According to the UN Population Division, the total fertility rate for the planet was only half as high in 2015 as it was in 1965. By the UNPD’s reckoning, every country saw birthrates drop over that period.

And the downswing in fertility just kept going. Today, the great majority of the world’s people live in countries with below-replacement fertility levels, patterns inherently incapable of sustaining long-term population stability. (As a rule of thumb, a total fertility rate of 2.1 births per woman approximates the replacement threshold in affluent countries with high life expectancy—but the replacement level is somewhat higher in countries with lower life expectancy or marked imbalances in the ratio of baby boys to baby girls.)

In recent years, the birth plunge has not only continued but also seemingly quickened. According to the UNPD, at least two-thirds of the world’s population lived in sub-replacement countries in 2019, on the eve of the COVID-19 pandemic. The economist Jesús Fernández-­Villaverde has contended that the overall global fertility rate may have dropped below the replacement level since then. Rich and poor countries alike have witnessed record-breaking, jaw-dropping collapses in fertility. A quick spin of the globe offers a startling picture.

Start with East Asia. The UNPD has reported that the entire region tipped into depopulation in 2021. By 2022, every major population there—in China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan—was shrinking. By 2023, fertility levels were 40 percent below replacement in Japan, over 50 percent below replacement in China, almost 60 percent below replacement in Taiwan, and an astonishing 65 percent below replacement in South Korea.

As for Southeast Asia, the UNPD has estimated that the region as a whole fell below the replacement level around 2018. Brunei, Malaysia, Singapore, and Vietnam have been sub-replacement countries for years. Indonesia, the fourth most populous country in the world, joined the sub-replacement club in 2022, according to official figures. The Philippines now reports just 1.9 births per woman. The birthrate of impoverished, war-riven Myanmar is below replacement, too. In Thailand, deaths now exceed births and the population is declining.

In South Asia, sub-replacement fertility prevails not only in India—now the world’s most populous country—but also in Nepal and Sri Lanka; all three dropped below replacement before the pandemic. (Bangladesh is on the verge of falling below the replacement threshold.) In India, urban fertility levels have dropped markedly. In the vast metropolis of Kolkata, for instance, state health officials reported in 2021 that the fertility rate was down to an amazing one birth per woman, less than half the replacement level and lower than in any major city in Germany or Italy.

Dramatic declines are also sweeping Latin America and the Caribbean. The UNPD has calculated overall fertility for the region in 2024 at 1.8 births per woman—14 percent below the replacement rate. But that projection may understate the actual decline, given what the Costa Rican demographer Luis Rosero-Bixby has described as the “vertiginous” drop in birthrates in the region since 2015. In his country, total fertility rates are now down to 1.2 births per woman. Cuba reported a 2023 fertility rate of just over 1.1, half the replacement rate; since 2019, deaths there have exceeded births. Uruguay’s rate was close to 1.3 in 2023 and, as in Cuba, deaths exceeded births. In Chile, the figure in 2023 was just over 1.1 births per woman. Major Latin American cities, including Bogota and Mexico City, now report rates below one birth per woman.

Sub-replacement fertility has even come to North Africa and the greater Middle East, where demographers have long assumed that the Islamic faith served as a bulwark against precipitous fertility declines. Despite the pro-natal philosophy of its theocratic rulers, Iran has been a sub-replacement society for about a quarter century. Tunisia has also dipped below replacement. In sub-replacement Turkey, Istanbul’s 2023 birthrate was just 1.2 babies per woman—lower than Berlin’s.

Global fertility has plunged since the population explosion in the 1960s.

For half a century, Europe’s overall fertility rates have been continuously sub-replacement. Russian fertility first dropped below replacement in the 1960s, during the Brezhnev era, and since the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia has witnessed 17 million more deaths than births. Like Russia, the 27 countries of the current European Union are about 30 percent below replacement today. Together, they reported just under 3.7 million births in 2023—down from 6.8 million in 1964. Last year, France tallied fewer births than it did in 1806, the year Napoleon won the Battle of Jena; Italy reported the fewest births since its 1861 reunification; and Spain the fewest since 1859, when it started to compile modern birth figures. Poland had its fewest births in the postwar era in 2023; so did Germany. The EU has been a net-mortality zone since 2012, and in 2022 it registered four deaths for every three births. The UNPD has marked 2019 as the peak year for Europe’s population and has estimated that in 2020, the continent entered what will become a long-term population decline.

The United States remains the main outlier among developed countries, resisting the trend of depopulation. With relatively high fertility levels for a rich country (although far below replacement—just over 1.6 births per woman in 2023) and steady inflows of immigrants, the United States has exhibited what I termed in these pages in 2019 “American demographic exceptionalism.” But even in the United States, depopulation is no longer unthinkable. Last year, the Census Bureau projected that the U.S. population would peak around 2080 and head into a continuous decline thereafter.

The only major remaining bastion against the global wave of sub-replacement levels of childbearing is sub-Saharan Africa. With its roughly 1.2 billion people and a UNPD-projected average fertility rate of 4.3 births per woman today, the region is the planet’s last consequential redoubt of the fertility patterns that characterized low-income countries during the population explosion of the middle half of the twentieth century.

But even there, rates are dropping. The UNPD has estimated that fertility levels in sub-Saharan Africa have fallen by over 35 percent since the late 1970s, when the subcontinent’s overall level was an astonishing 6.8 births per woman. In South Africa, birth levels appear to be just fractionally above replacement, with other countries in southern Africa close behind. A number of island countries off the African coast, including Cape Verde and Mauritius, are already sub-replacement.

The UNPD has estimated that the replacement threshold for the world as a whole is roughly 2.18 births per woman. Its latest medium variant projections—roughly, the median of projected outcomes—for 2024 have put global fertility at just three percent above replacement, and its low variant projections—the lower end of projected outcomes—have estimated that the planet is already eight percent below that level. It is possible that humanity has dropped below the planetary net-replacement rate already. What is certain, however, is that for a quarter of the world, population decline is already underway, and the rest of the world is on course to follow those pioneers into the depopulation that lies ahead.

THE POWER OF CHOICE

The worldwide plunge in fertility levels is still in many ways a mystery. It is generally believed that economic growth and material progress—what scholars often call “development” or “modernization”—account for the world’s slide into super-low birthrates and national population decline. Since birthrate declines commenced with the socioeconomic rise of the West—and since the planet is becoming ever richer, healthier, more educated, and more urbanized—many observers presume lower birthrates are simply the direct consequence of material advances.

But the truth is that developmental thresholds for below-replacement fertility have been falling over time. Nowadays, countries can veer into sub-replacement with low incomes, limited levels of education, little urbanization, and extreme poverty. Myanmar and Nepal are impoverished UN-designated Least Developed Countries, but they are now also sub-replacement societies.

During the postwar period, a veritable library of research has been published on factors that might explain the decline in fertility that picked up pace in the twentieth century. Drops in infant mortality rates, greater access to modern contraception, higher rates of education and literacy, increases in female labor-force participation and the status of women—all these potential determinants and many more were extensively scrutinized by scholars. But stubborn real-life exceptions always prevented the formation of any ironclad socioeconomic generalization about fertility decline.

Eventually, in 1994, the economist Lant Pritchett discovered the most powerful national fertility predictor ever detected. That decisive factor turned out to be simple: what women want. Because survey data conventionally focus on female fertility preferences, not those of their husbands or partners, scholars know much more about women’s desire for children than men’s. Pritchett determined that there is an almost one-to-one correspondence around the world between national fertility levels and the number of babies women say they want to have. This finding underscored the central role of volition—of human agency—in fertility patterns.

But if volition shapes birthrates, what explains the sudden worldwide dive into sub-replacement territory? Why, in rich and poor countries alike, are families with a single child, or no children at all, suddenly becoming so much more common? Scholars have not yet been able to answer that question. But in the absence of a definitive answer, a few observations and speculations will have to suffice.

It is apparent, for example, that a revolution in the family—in family formation, not just in childbearing—is underway in societies around the world. This is true in rich countries and poor ones, across cultural traditions and value systems. Signs of this revolution include what researchers call the “flight from marriage,” with people getting married at later ages or not at all; the spread of nonmarital cohabitation and temporary unions; and the increase in homes in which one person lives independently—in other words, alone. These new arrangements track with the emergence of below-replacement fertility in societies around the globe—not perfectly, but well enough.

It is striking that these revealed preferences have so quickly become prevalent on almost every continent. People the world over are now aware of the possibility of very different ways of life from the ones that confined their parents. Certainly, religious belief—which generally encourages marriage and celebrates child rearing—seems to be on the wane in many regions where birthrates are crashing. Conversely, people increasingly prize autonomy, self-actualization, and convenience. And children, for their many joys, are quintessentially inconvenient.

Population trends today should raise serious questions about all the old nostrums that humans are somehow hard-wired to replace themselves to continue the species. Indeed, what is happening might be better explained by the field of mimetic theory, which recognizes that imitation can drive decisions, stressing the role of volition and social learning in human arrangements. Many women (and men) may be less keen to have children because so many others are having fewer children. The increasing rarity of large families could make it harder for humans to choose to return to having them—owing to what scholars call loss of “social learning”—and prolong low levels of fertility. Volition is why, even in an increasingly healthy and prosperous world of over eight billion people, the extinction of every family line could be only one generation away.

COUNTRIES FOR OLD MEN

The consensus among demographic authorities today is that the global population will peak later this century and then start to decline. Some estimates suggest that this might happen as soon as 2053, others as late as the 2070s or 2080s.

Regardless of when this turn commences, a depopulated future will differ sharply from the present. Low fertility rates mean that annual deaths will exceed annual births in more countries and by widening margins over the coming generation. According to some projections, by 2050, over 130 countries across the planet will be part of the growing net-mortality zone—an area encompassing about five-eighths of the world’s projected population. Net-mortality countries will emerge in sub-Saharan Africa by 2050, starting with South Africa. Once a society has entered net mortality, only continued and ever-increasing immigration can stave off long-term population decline.

Future labor forces will shrink around the world because of the spread of sub-replacement birthrates today. By 2040, national cohorts of people between the ages of 15 and 49 will decrease more or less everywhere outside sub-Saharan Africa. That group is already shrinking in the West and in East Asia. It is set to start dropping in Latin America by 2033 and will do so just a few years later in Southeast Asia (2034), India (2036), and Bangladesh (2043). By 2050, two-thirds of people around the world could see working-age populations (people between the ages of 20 and 64) diminish in their countries—a trend that stands to constrain economic potential in those countries in the absence of innovative adjustments and countermeasures.

A depopulating world will be an aging one. Across the globe, the march to low fertility, and now to super-low birthrates, is creating top-heavy population pyramids, in which the old begin to outnumber the young. Over the coming generation, aged societies will become the norm.

Policymakers are not ready for the coming demographic order.

By 2040—except, once again, in sub-Saharan Africa—the number of people under the age of 50 will decline. By 2050, there will be hundreds of millions fewer people under the age of 60 outside sub-Saharan Africa than there are today—some 13 percent fewer, according to several UNPD projections. At the same time, the number of people who are 65 or older will be exploding: a consequence of relatively high birthrates back in the late twentieth century and longer life expectancy.

While the overall population growth slumps, the number of seniors (defined here as people aged 65 or older) will surge exponentially—everywhere. Outside Africa, that group will double in size to 1.4 billion by 2050. The upsurge in the 80-plus population—the “super-old”—will be even more rapid. That contingent will nearly triple in the non-African world, leaping to roughly 425 million by 2050. Just over two decades ago, fewer than 425 million people on the planet had even reached their 65th birthday.

The shape of things to come is suggested by mind-bending projections for countries at the vanguard of tomorrow’s depopulation: places with abidingly low birthrates for over half a century and favorable life expectancy trends. South Korea provides the most stunning vision of a depopulating society just a generation away. Current projections have suggested that South Korea will mark three deaths for every birth by 2050. In some UNPD projections, the median age in South Korea will approach 60. More than 40 percent of the country’s population will be senior citizens; more than one in six South Koreans will be over the age of 80. South Korea will have just a fifth as many babies in 2050 as it did in 1961. It will have barely 1.2 working-age people for every senior citizen.

Should South Korea’s current fertility trends persist, the country’s population will continue to decline by over three percent per year—crashing by 95 percent over the course of a century. What is on track to happen in South Korea offers a foretaste of what lies in store for the rest of the world.

WAVE OF SENESCENCE

Depopulation will upend familiar social and economic rhythms. Societies will have to adjust their expectations to comport with the new realities of fewer workers, savers, taxpayers, renters, home buyers, entrepreneurs, innovators, inventors, and, eventually, consumers and voters. The pervasive graying of the population and protracted population decline will hobble economic growth and cripple social welfare systems in rich countries, threatening their very prospects for continued prosperity. Without sweeping changes in incentive structures, life-cycle earning and consumption patterns, and government policies for taxation and social expenditures, dwindling workforces, reduced savings and investment, unsustainable social outlays, and budget deficits are all in the cards for today’s developed countries.

Until this century, only affluent societies in the West and in East Asia had gone gray. But in the foreseeable future, many poorer countries will have to contend with the needs of an aged society even though their workers are far less productive than those in wealthier countries.

Consider Bangladesh: a poor country today that will be an elderly society tomorrow, with over 13 percent of its 2050 population projected to be seniors. The backbone of the Bangladeshi labor force in 2050 will be today’s youth. But standardized tests show that five in six members of this group fail to meet even the very lowest international skill standards deemed necessary for participation in a modern economy: the overwhelming majority of this rising cohort cannot “read and answer basic questions” or “add, subtract, and round whole numbers and decimals.” In 2020, Ireland was roughly as elderly as Bangladesh will be in 2050—but in Ireland nowadays, only one in six young people lacks such minimal skills.

The poor, elderly countries of the future may find themselves under great pressure to build welfare states before they can actually fund them. But income levels are likely to be decidedly lower in 2050 for many Asian, Latin American, Middle Eastern, and North African countries than they were in Western countries at the same stage of population graying—how can these countries achieve the adequate means to support and care for their elderly populations?

In rich and poor countries alike, a coming wave of senescence stands to impose completely unfamiliar burdens on many societies. Although people in their 60s and 70s may well lead economically active and financially self-reliant lives in the foreseeable future, the same is not true for those in their 80s or older. The super-old are the world’s fastest-growing cohort. By 2050, there will be more of them than children in some countries. The burden of caring for people with dementia will pose growing costs—human, social, economic—in an aging and shrinking world.

That burden will become all the more onerous as families wither. Families are society’s most basic unit and are still humanity’s most indispensable institution. Both precipitous aging and steep sub-replacement fertility are inextricably connected to the ongoing revolution in family structure. As familial units grow smaller and more atomized, fewer people get married, and high levels of voluntary childlessness take hold in country after country. As a result, families and their branches become ever less able to bear weight—even as the demands that might be placed on them steadily rise.

Just how depopulating societies will cope with this broad retreat of the family is by no means obvious. Perhaps others could step in to assume roles traditionally undertaken by blood relatives. But appeals to duty and sacrifice for those who are not kin may lack the strength of calls from within a family. Governments may try to fill the breach, but sad experience with a century and a half of social policy suggests that the state is a horrendously expensive substitute for the family—and not a very good one. Technological advances—robotics, artificial intelligence, human-like cyber-caregivers and cyber-“friends”—may eventually make some currently unfathomable contribution. But for now, that prospect belongs in the realm of science fiction, and even there, dystopia is far more likely than anything verging on utopia.

THE MAGIC FORMULA

This new chapter for humanity may seem ominous, perhaps frightening. But even in a graying and depopulating world, steadily improving living standards and material and technological advances will still be possible.

Just two generations ago, governments, pundits, and global institutions were panicking about a population explosion, fearing mass starvation and immiseration as a result of childbearing in poor countries. In hindsight, that panic was bizarrely overblown. The so-called population explosion was in reality a testament to increases in life expectancy owing to better public health practices and access to health care. Despite tremendous population growth in the last century, the planet is richer and better fed than ever before—and natural resources are more plentiful and less expensive (after adjusting for inflation) than ever before.

The same formula that spread prosperity during the twentieth century can ensure further advances in the twenty-first and beyond—even in a world marked by depopulation. The essence of modern economic development is the continuing augmentation of human potential and a propitious business climate, framed by policies and institutions that help unlock the value in human beings. With that formula, India, for instance, has virtually eliminated extreme poverty over the past half century. Improvements in health, education, and science and technology are fuel for the motor generating material advances. Irrespective of demographic aging and shrinking, societies can still benefit from progress across the board in these areas. The world has never been as extensively schooled as it is today, and there is no reason to expect the rise in training to stop, despite aging and shrinking populations, given the immense gains that accrue from education to both societies and the trainees themselves.

Remarkable improvements in health and education around the world speak to the application of scientific and social knowledge—the stock of which has been relentlessly advancing, thanks to human inquiry and innovation. That drive will not stop now. Even an elderly, depopulating world can grow increasingly affluent.

The lack of desire for children is why the extinction of every family line could be only one generation away.

Yet as the old population pyramid is turned on its head and societies assume new structures under long-term population decline, people will need to develop new habits of mind, conventions, and cooperative objectives. Policymakers will have to learn new rules for development amid depopulation. The basic formula for material advance—reaping the rewards of augmented human resources and technological innovation through a favorable business climate—will be the same. But the terrain of risk and opportunity facing societies and economies will change with depopulation. And in response, governments will have to adjust their policies to reckon with the new realities.

The initial transition to depopulation will no doubt entail painful, wrenching changes. In depopulating societies, today’s “pay-as-you-go” social programs for national pension and old-age health care will fail as the working population shrinks and the number of elderly claimants balloons. If today’s age-specific labor and spending patterns continue, graying and depopulating countries will lack the savings to invest for growth or even to replace old infrastructure and equipment. Current incentives, in short, are seriously misaligned for the advent of depopulation. But policy reforms and private-sector responses can hasten necessary adjustments.

To adapt successfully to a depopulating world, states, businesses, and individuals will have to place a premium on responsibility and savings. There will be less margin for error for investment projects, be they public or private, and no rising tide of demand from a growing pool of consumers or taxpayers to count on.

As people live longer and remain healthy into their advanced years, they will retire later. Voluntary economic activity at ever-older ages will make lifelong learning imperative. Artificial intelligence may be a double-edged sword in this regard: although AI may offer productivity improvements that depopulating societies could not otherwise manage, it could also hasten the displacement of those with inadequate or outdated skills. High unemployment could turn out to be a problem in shrinking, labor-scarce societies, too.

States and societies will have to ensure that labor markets are flexible—reducing barriers to entry, welcoming the job turnover and churn that boost dynamism, eliminating age discrimination, and more—given the urgency of increasing the productivity of a dwindling labor force. To foster economic growth, countries will need even greater scientific advances and technological innovation.

Prosperity in a depopulating world will also depend on open economies: free trade in goods, services, and finance to counter the constraints that declining populations otherwise engender. And as the hunger for scarce talent becomes more acute, the movement of people will take on new economic salience. In the shadow of depopulation, immigration will matter even more than it does today.

Not all aged societies, however, will be capable of assimilating young immigrants or turning them into loyal and productive citizens. And not all migrants will be capable of contributing effectively to receiving economies, especially given the stark lack of basic skills characterizing too many of the world’s rapidly growing populations today.

Pragmatic migration strategies will be of benefit to depopulating societies in the generations ahead—bolstering their labor forces, tax bases, and consumer spending while also rewarding the immigrants’ countries of origin with lucrative remittances. With populations shrinking, governments will have to compete for migrants, with an even greater premium placed on attracting talent from abroad. Getting competitive migration policies right—and securing public support for them—will be a major task for future governments but one well worth the effort.

THE GEOPOLITICS OF NUMBERS

Depopulation will not only transform how governments deal with their citizens; it will also transform how they deal with one another. Humanity’s shrinking ranks will inexorably alter the current global balance of power and strain the existing world order.

Some of the ways it will do so are relatively easy to foresee today. One of the demographic certainties about the generation ahead is that differentials in population growth will make for rapid shifts in the relative size of the world’s major regions. Tomorrow’s world will be much more African. Although about a seventh of the world’s population today lives in sub-Saharan Africa, the region accounts for nearly a third of all births; its share of the world’s workforce and population are thus set to grow immensely over the coming generation.

But this does not necessarily mean that an “African century” lies just ahead. In a world where per capita output varies by as much as a factor of 100 between countries, human capital—not just population totals—matters greatly to national power, and the outlook for human capital in sub-Saharan Africa remains disappointing. Standardized tests indicate that a stunning 94 percent of youth in the region lack even basic skills. As huge as the region’s 2050 pool of workers promises to be, the number of workers with basic skills may not be much larger there than it will be in Russia alone in 2050.

India is now the world’s most populous country and on track to continue to grow for at least another few decades. Its demographics virtually assure that the country will be a leading power in 2050. But India’s rise is compromised by human resource vulnerabilities. India has a world-class cadre of scientists, technicians, and elite graduates. But ordinary Indians receive poor education. A shocking seven out of eight young people in India today lack even basic skills—a consequence of both low enrollment and the generally poor quality of the primary and secondary schools available to those lucky enough to get schooling. The skills profile for China’s youth is decades, maybe generations, ahead of India’s youth today. India is unlikely to surpass a depopulating China in per capita output or even in total GDP for a very long time.

The coalescing partnership among China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia is intent on challenging the U.S.-led Western order. These revisionist countries have aggressive and ambitious leaders and are seemingly confident in their international objectives. But the demographic tides are against them.

A revolution in family formation is underway in societies around the world.

China and Russia are long-standing sub-replacement societies, both now with shrinking workforces and declining populations. Iran’s population is likewise far below replacement levels. Population data on North Korea remain secret, but the dictator Kim Jong Un’s very public worrying late last year about the national birthrate suggests the leadership is not happy about the country’s demographics.

Russia’s shrinking numbers and its seemingly intractable difficulties with public health and knowledge production have been reducing the country’s relative economic power for decades, with no turnaround in sight. China’s birth crash—the next generation is on track to be only half as large as the preceding one—will unavoidably slash the workforce and turbocharge population aging, even as the Chinese extended family, heretofore the country’s main social safety net, atrophies and disintegrates. These impending realities presage unimagined new social welfare burdens for a no longer dazzling Chinese economy and may end up hamstringing the funding for Beijing’s international ambitions.

To be sure, revisionist states with nuclear weapons can pose outsize risks to the existing global order—witness the trouble North Korea causes despite a negligible GDP. But the demographic foundations for national power are tilting against the renegades as their respective depopulations loom.

As for the United States, the demographic fundamentals look fairly sound—at least when compared with the competition. Demographic trends are on course to augment American power over the coming decades, lending support for continued U.S. global preeminence. Given the domestic tensions and social strains that Americans are living through today, these long-term American advantages may come as a surprise. But they are already beginning to be taken into account by observers and actors abroad.

Although the United States is a sub-replacement society, it has higher fertility levels than any East Asian country and almost all European states. In conjunction with strong immigrant inflows, the United States’ less anemic birth trends give the country a very different demographic trajectory from that of most other affluent Western societies, with continued population and labor-force growth and only moderate population aging in store through 2050.

Thanks in large measure to immigration, the United States is on track to account for a growing share of the rich world’s labor force, youth, and highly educated talent. Continuing inflows of skilled immigrants also give the country a great advantage. No other population on the planet is better placed to translate population potential into national power—and it looks as if that demographic edge will be at least as great in 2050. Compared with other contenders, U.S. demographics look great today—and may look even better tomorrow—pending, it must be underscored, continued public support for immigration. The United States remains the most important geopolitical exception to the coming depopulation.

But depopulation will also scramble the balance of power in unpredictable ways. Two unknowns stand out above all others: how swiftly and adeptly depopulating societies will adapt to their unfamiliar new circumstances and how prolonged depopulation might affect national will and morale.

Nothing guarantees that societies will successfully navigate the turbulence caused by depopulation. Social resilience and social cohesion can surely facilitate these transitions, but some societies are decidedly less resilient and cohesive than others. To achieve economic and social advances despite depopulation will require substantial reforms in government institutions, the corporate sector, social organizations, and personal norms and behavior. But far less heroic reform programs fail all the time in the current world, doomed by poor planning, inept leadership, and thorny politics.

The overwhelming majority of the world’s GDP today is generated by countries that will find themselves in depopulation a generation from now. Depopulating societies that fail to pivot will pay a price: first in economic stagnation and then quite possibly in financial and socioeconomic crisis. If enough depopulating societies fail to pivot, their struggles will drag down the global economy. The nightmare scenario would be a zone of important but depopulating economies, accounting for much of the world’s output, frozen into perpetual sclerosis or decline by pessimism, anxiety, and resistance to reform. Even if depopulating societies eventually adapt successfully to their new circumstances, as might well be expected, there is no guarantee they will do so on the timetable that new population trends now demand.

National security ramifications could also be crucial. An immense strategic unknown about a depopulating world is whether pervasive aging, anemic birthrates, and prolonged depopulation will affect the readiness of shrinking societies to defend themselves and their willingness to sustain casualties in doing so. Despite all the labor-saving innovations changing the face of battle, there is still no substitute in war for warm—and vulnerable—bodies.

Depopulation will transform how governments deal with their citizens and with one another.

The defense of one’s country cannot be undertaken without sacrifices—including, sometimes, the ultimate sacrifice. But autonomy, self-actualization, and the quest for personal freedom drive today’s “flight from the family” throughout the rich world. If a commitment to form a family is regarded as onerous, how much more so a demand for the supreme sacrifice for people one has never even met? On the other hand, it is also possible that many people, especially young men, with few familial bonds and obligations might be less risk averse and also hungry for the kind of community, belonging, and sense of purpose that military service might offer.

Casualty tolerance in depopulating countries may also depend greatly on unforeseen contingent conditions—and may have surprising results. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has provided a test. Both countries had very low birth rates on the eve of the invasion. And both the authoritarian aggressor and the democratic defender have proved willing to absorb grievous casualties in a war now grinding through its third year.

China presents perhaps the biggest question mark when it comes to depopulation and a willingness to fight. Thanks to both the one-child policy that was ruthlessly enforced for decades and the unexpected baby bust since the program was suspended nearly ten years ago, China’s military will perforce be manned in large part by young people who were raised without siblings. A mass-casualty event would have devastating consequences for families across the country, bringing entire lineages to an end.

It is reasonable to wager that China would fight ferociously against a foreign invasion. But such casualty tolerance might not extend to overseas adventures and expeditionary journeys that go awry. If China, for example, decides to undertake and then manages to sustain a costly campaign against Taiwan, the world will have learned something grim about what may lie ahead in the age of depopulation.

A NEW CHAPTER

The era of depopulation is nigh. Dramatic aging and the indefinite decline of the human population—eventually on a global scale—will mark the end of an extraordinary chapter of human history and the beginning of another, quite possibly no less extraordinary than the one before it. Depopulation will transform humanity profoundly, likely in numerous ways societies have not begun to consider and may not yet be in a position to understand.

Yet for all the momentous changes ahead, people can also expect important and perhaps reassuring continuities. Humanity has already found the formula for banishing material scarcity and engineering ever-greater prosperity. That formula can work regardless of whether populations rise or fall. Routinized material advance has been made possible by a system of peaceful human cooperation—deep, vast, and unfathomably complex—and that largely market-based system will continue to unfold from the current era into the next. Human volition—the driver behind today’s worldwide declines in childbearing—stands to be no less powerful a force tomorrow than it is today.

Humanity bestrides the planet, explores the cosmos, and continues to reshape itself because humans are the world’s most inventive, adaptable animal. But it will take more than a bit of inventiveness and adaptability to cope with the unintended future consequences of the family and fertility choices being made today.

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• NICHOLAS EBERSTADT is Henry Wendt Chair in Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute.

Also see this NY Times article

The book on Amazon
Reunion and Reaction: The Compromise of 1877 and the End of Reconstruction

CHAPTER I

The Unknown Compromise

FIVE TIMES in the course of the nineteenth century there arose political crises of such gravity as to call forth all the celebrated American genius for compromise. Four of these crises involved the threat of disunion or violence, if not war. In only one of them did the customary way of compromise fail, the threats materialize, and the crisis end in tragedy . All the others were settled by compromises that form some of the most important chapters in American history. 

Compromise became part and parcel of the basic pattern of American political life. The one great departure from the tradition occurred in 1861 and the sixteen years that followed. In the clash between “right” on the side of the North and “rights” on the side of the South the normal processes of compromise broke down. Americans resorted to armed force to settle their differences. After the trial by battle the victors dictated the peace and imposed terms by force. For this brief and entirely exceptional period principles held sway and differences were framed in terms of moral issues. So long as this was true there was no room for compromise, for compromise had to come at the expense of principle. Neither side to the dispute could be permitted a monopoly of rectitude, and concessions were required of both. Principles had to give way to expediency and force to persuasion. 

The Compromise of 1877 marked the abandonment of principles and of force and a return to the traditional ways of expediency and concession. The compromise laid the political foundation for reunion. It established a new sectional truce that proved more enduring than any previous one and provided a settlement for an issue that had troubled American politics for more than a generation. It wrote an end to Reconstruction and recognized a new regime in the South. More profoundly than Constitutional amendments and wordy statutes it shaped the future of four million freedmen and their progeny for generations to come. It preserved one part of the fruits of the “Second American Revolution ” — the pragmatic and economic part — at the expense of the other part — the idealistic and humanitarian part. The settlement was not ideal from any point of view, nor was it very logical either. But that is the way of compromises. 

In spite of the fact that the Compromise of 1877 proved more enduring in its basic aspects than any of its predecessors there has been less known about it than about any of them. The terms of the historic Compromises of 1820, 1833, and 1850 were publicly debated, openly arrived at, and published that all might read. Those who attempted to frame a Compromise of 1861 proceeded in the same manner until overwhelmed with failure. In all of them both of the parties to the dispute were called upon to surrender cherished hopes and claims in exchange for the concession of half measures and a suitable quid pro quo. There was usually a great deal of haggling over terms in the august oratory of the age. In the end an inspired leader — Henry Clay in the first three instances — brought forward a solution that overcame remaining objections and the compromise was made. 

Such was the nature of the Compromise of 1877, however, and so dangerous was believed the menace of war or anarchy, that negotiations for an agreement were conducted secretly or in an extremely guarded fashion. The fact that Southern Democrats were in effect going behind the backs of the Northern members of their own party to arrive at an understanding with the Republicans was not conducive to publicity. Nor was the fact that the Republican managers were abandoning the platform on which they were elected and forfeiting principles to which a powerful wing of their party still clung . The diplomacy of 1877 might be described as secret covenants privately arrived at. The terms were never officially published, for neither party to the contract could afford to endorse all of the agreements publicly. Nor did some of the more important articles materialize as events. In some cases they proved impossible of fulfillment, and in others promises were broken or forgotten. 

Remarkably few leaders were fully informed of the compromise proceedings, and those who were kept their counsel in later years. In 1937, sixty years after the event, Abram S. Hewitt’s “Secret History” of the crisis was published. 1 This valuable document revealed much that had not been known and settled several controversies. But Hewitt was spokesman of the wing of Democrats that was bypassed and, some charged, betrayed by the compromise. If he was ever fully informed of the negotiations his “Secret History” does not reveal the fact. Milton H. Northrup, secretary of one of the congressional committees that studied the problem, wrote an “Inner History” of the events, but he was not concerned with aspects that lay beneath the surface. 2 

During his lifetime Henry Watterson published what he called an “Inside History” of the crisis. The Kentuckian was matters should remain a sealed book in my memory. I make no issue of veracity with the living; the dead should be sacred.” He then told the story of a gay dinner party in Washington during Cleveland’s first administration. It was a small convivial affair attended by the President. Among the guests were “two leading Democrats and two leading Republicans,” identified only as having important roles in the crisis of ’77. Late in the evening the four politicians began vying with each other in revealing secrets of the disputed election. “The little audience was rapt,” recalled Watterson. “Finally Mr. Cleveland raised both hands and exclaimed, ‘What would the people of this country think if the roof could be lifted from this house and they could hear these men.’” Whereupon one of the raconteurs, “noted for his wealth both of money and humor,” declared, “If anyone repeats what I have said I will denounce him as a liar.” Watterson himself was confident that “the whole truth underlying the determinate incidents which led to the rejection of Tilden and the seating of Hayes will never be known.” 3 

Modern historians have risen to this challenge and made repeated efforts to penetrate the curtain of silence deliberately dropped upon the past. But the more candid of them have confessed dissatisfaction with their results and pointed out the need for more illumination or despaired of ever gaining it. Thus one historian, who has written extensively on the subject and on figures prominent in the period, echoes Watterson when he writes of certain crucial events in the story that “the full truth will never be known.” 4 

The “whole truth,” as any historian knows, is a necessary fiction of the courtroom and the witness stand. It is admittedly an unattainable goal in the reconstruction of the past. Large parts of the truth regarding the subject of the present work are available in many books, the work of numerous minds. It is remarkable, however, that so many of what Watterson called the “determinate incidents,” the forces underlying events, have been neglected or overlooked for three quarters of a century. 

“But isn’t the ‘Bargain of 1877’ an old story?” it will be asked. “Was it not the result of something called the Wormley Conference in Washington?” It is true that this story has a place reserved in every history schoolbook and that it has been treated with more or less seriousness by the more detailed accounts of the crisis. It has been accepted as explaining why the Southern Democrats, convinced to a man that Samuel J. Tilden had been legally elected President and hating everything that Republicanism stood for, were persuaded to desert the Democratic cause and assist in the seating of Rutherford B. Hayes, even though they had within their power the means of preventing what they believed to be a gigantic fraud. 

The circumstances of the “Bargain” will be readily recalled. It was the last week of Grant’s second administration and no successor had been chosen . Democrats in the House of Representatives, where the party enjoyed a large majority, were threatening by dilatory and filibustering tactics to prevent the completion of the electoral count before March 4. Should they be successful many people expected fighting to break out — “more people,” according to one historian, “than had anticipated a like outcome to the secession movement of 1860– 61.” 5

Describing “the excitement and the apprehension which prevailed throughout the country,” Hewitt wrote: “Business was arrested, the wheels of industry ceased to move, and it seemed as if the terrors of civil war were again to be renewed.” In fact, he added, “to this dread issue we were much nearer than was even at that time supposed .” He knew of fifteen states in which Democratic forces composed largely of war veterans were organized and prepared to move on Washington to compel the inauguration of Tilden. The commander-in-chief had been selected, and “the governors of many states,” Hewitt wrote without specifying, and with probable exaggeration, had declared their willingness to use military force if necessary. 6 

At the very climax of this crisis, so the story goes, on February 26 and 27 intimate friends of Governor Hayes came to an understanding with a group of Southern representatives in a series of conferences. The upshot of these conferences was that the Republicans agreed to abandon the two remaining Republican governments in the South, those of Louisiana and South Carolina, in favor of the Democratic claimants. On their part the Southerners promised to defeat their party’s filibuster, assist in completing the count, and see that Hayes was peacefully inaugurated. In effect, the Southerners were abandoning the cause of Tilden in exchange for control over two states, and the Republicans were abandoning the cause of the Negro in exchange for the peaceful possession of the Presidency. As part of the arrangement, however, the Southern representatives promised that the rights of the Negro would be safeguarded and that there would be no bloody reprisals against political enemies, while the Republican spokesmen undertook to persuade President Grant to withdraw Federal troops from the South as soon as the electoral count was completed and promised that if they were not successful in this effort Hayes would withdraw the troops after his inauguration. Two days later, after an impassioned appeal in the House by a Louisianan, the Democratic filibuster collapsed, the count was completed, and Hayes was declared elected. 

This in summary is the traditional account of the Bargain of 1877. To explain the inadequacy of this account and place on record the large aspects it omits will require the remaining pages of this book. In passing, however, it might be mentioned that at the time the Wormley Conference was held and the so-called Bargain struck the Southerners were already committed to the course they pursued and Hayes was already committed to a policy of conciliating the South. The question of the removal of the troops is of particular interest. Everyone assumed as a matter of course that the collapse of the Republican regimes and the succession of the Democrats — or “Redemption” and “Home-Rule,” as Southerners described it — would follow as soon as the troops were withdrawn. This has been presented as the critical point of the Wormley Conference and the quid pro quo of the Bargain from the Southern point of view. But the fact was that a week before these negotiations opened a means had been devised to insure the removal of the troops in case Hayes forgot his promises or was unable to carry them out. At a Democratic caucus on February 19,1877, a majority of the members voted for a resolution to write into the army appropriations bill, then still pending, a clause forbidding the use of troops to support the claims of any state government in the South until it should be recognized by Congress. A bill containing such a clause was passed by the House and a penalty of hard labor and imprisonment provided for anyone found guilty of violating the act. When the Republican Senate refused to accept the clause the House stood its ground and adjourned without making any appropriations for the army whatever. 

After he became President, the only way Hayes could get provisions, pay, and transportation for the army after the end of the fiscal year was to call an extra session of Congress. Since the new House would also have a hostile majority, Hayes postponed the extra session for seven months. He was thus compelled to rely upon unpaid and unhappy officers and men to suppress the violent labor upheavals in several states in August 1877. The army remained unpaid and unhappy until November 30, after Congress finally relented. 7 

This was the situation to which Mrs. Hayes referred in August 1877 when, during a conversation with Thomas Donaldson regarding the President’s abandonment of the Republican governors in the: South, she exclaimed: “Why, what could Mr. Hayes do but what he did? He had no army.” 8 The President himself, talking with Don aldson at the White House on the same subject in October, remarked: “In addition, the House was against me and I had no army, and public sentiment demanded a change of policy.” 9 Senator Oliver P. Morton of Indiana, while deploring the policy, completely absolved Hayes from blame for deserting the Carpetbaggers and placed the responsibility upon the stubborn majority of the House. 10 

In saying that “public sentiment demanded a change of policy,” Hayes was acknowledging the power of a force so strong that it had compelled President Grant to give up his own policy of intervening with force in the South to uphold Republican governments. During the last three months of his administration he maintained a benevolent neutrality that enabled the “Redeemers” of Louisiana and South Carolina to establish de facto control over those states and left the Carpetbaggers with a mere shadow of authority . On February 26 Grant publicly admitted that the people of the country were “clearly opposed to the further use of troops in upholding a state government.” He also promised the Southerners to recall the troops as soon as the electoral count was completed, and that he did not succeed in fulfilling that promise does not appear to have been his fault. 11 Grant deserves much of the credit or blame that has been assigned to Hayes for initiating the new Southern policy. 

In effect, Hayes’s friends at the Wormley Conference were giving up something they no longer really possessed in exchange for something that had already been secured by other means. While on the other hand the Southerners were solemnly accepting something that had been secured by other means in exchange for adherence to a course to which, by that time, they were already committed. It was, on the whole, one of the strangest bargains in the annals of horse swapping. 

The Bargain nevertheless had its practical uses and consequences — though not those popularly presumed. Shortly after the inauguration of Hayes certain Southern participants in the Bargain turned over some of the documents involved to the press and gave copious interviews in which they revealed the details of the negotiations. 12 By their own admission these men had been under severe criticism from their constituents for some time prior to the Bargain because of their co-operation with the Republicans, a course they had been pursuing for several weeks. Their press interviews, widely quoted and commented upon, did not underestimate the contribution these gentlemen had made to statesmanship, nor the dramatic circumstances of their effort. Their stories of the Bargain served as a plausible justification of a course that had been the subject of angry criticism at home. They also served to magnify the role that certain politicians played in Redemption and to enhance their reputation as Redeemers. And finally, although Hayes had been previously committed to conciliatory Southern policy, and his hand had been forced by withholding of the army appropriation, the Bargain pledges of his friends may have assisted in smoothing the path for an early fulfillment of his policy. 

Although the much-publicized Bargain story falls far short of being adequate, it has nevertheless been taken seriously by historians from the time of its origin. The continued stress, and even a renewed emphasis upon the story, is reflected by the most recent biographer of President Hayes. “The bargain with Hayes,” he writes, “was one of the most important events in American history. It ended the Reconstruction and started the South on the road to prosperity and power.” 13 

An event of anything like the importance attributed to this deserves a much more searching analysis than it has ever had. In the first place the Compromise of 1877 was not arrived at in two days of last-minute haggling. Instead , the negotiations stretched over a period of several months . They were not confined to a settlement of the domestic affairs of two states. For in the expanse of territory and the variety of interests embraced, the Compromise of 1877 is readily comparable with the classical compromises that preceded it. These interests ranged from the Eastern seaboard to the Pacific coast . The negotiators concerned themselves not merely with the political problems of two Southern states but with the economic, social, and political problems of the whole South. They sought the fulfillment of Southern hopes and aspirations that were older than the Civil War, as well as relief from grievances arising out of Reconstruction. They enlisted in their efforts the aid of the most powerful capitalists in the country and bestirred the civic ambitions of points as remote as San Diego and Philadelphia, New Orleans and Chicago. They planned a reorientation of Southern politics along the old Democratic-Whig lines and a breaking up of the incipient white solidarity of the region by converting conservative whites to Republicanism. 

Much more was at stake in the winter of 1876– 1877 than the Presidency, the question of whether Samuel J. Tilden or Rutherford B. Hayes would occupy the White House. To many people in the North it appeared that all the hard -won fruits of the Civil War were in danger of being lost or placed in serious jeopardy. On one plane there were the more idealistic aims of the North’s Civil War and Reconstruction policies, the aims centered around the freeing and protection of the Negro and reflected in the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution. On a different plane there were the less idealistic, less publicized aims of Northern policy during the war and the period following. These aims centered in the protection of a sectional economy and numerous privileged interests, and were reflected in new statutes regarding taxes, money, tariffs, banks, land, railroads, subsidies, all placed upon the law books while the South was out of the Union. Should it come to a choice of saving the fruits of Northern policy on one plane at the cost of sacrificing those on the other, Northern sentiment would be confronted with a serious dilemma. 

It was a depression year, the worst year of the severest depression yet experienced. In the East labor and the unemployed were in a bitter and violent temper that foreshadowed the unprecedented upheaval of the summer . Out West a tide of agrarian radicalism was rising in the shape of Granger, Greenbacker, and Silverite heresies . From both East and West there came threats against the elaborate structure of protective tariffs, national banks, railroad subsidies, and monetary arrangements upon which the new economic order was founded. 

And now the South, the eleven former Confederate states under control of new leaders, presented a third threat to the new order. Traditionally hostile to the new capitalistic arrangements, kept at bay for sixteen years, believed to be nursing bitter grievances, and suspected of harboring all manner of mischief, the South was at last returning in full force, united as never before, to upset the sectional balance of power. So long as Republican rule lasted in the South the region had proved a bulwark to the new economic order, for however radical the party had been in realizing its more idealistic aims of equality and freedom within the South, the congressmen it sent to Washington had voted solidly with Northern Republicans in support of the more pragmatic aims of economic privilege. But how would the South, under guidance of the Redeemers, cast her weight in the impending struggle over national issues? Would she make common cause with other rebellious elements? Would she join hands with restless labor in the East as she had in Jackson’s time? Or would she, as many feared and predicted , rush into the arms of her ante-bellum ally, the agrarian West, break up the East-West alliance that won the war, and throw the East back into the position of an isolated minority section? Or, finally, could the South be induced to combine with the Northern conservatives and become a prop instead of a menace to the new capitalist order ? If so, what inducements would be found necessary? These questions figured in the deliberations of those who sought a practical solution to the electoral crisis and played their part in the Compromise of 1877. 

There was something else at stake, and it was probably of more consequence in the long run than any of the previous considerations. This was the question of whether the country could regain the ability to settle Presidential elections without the resort to force. The South had seceded in 1860 rather than accept the peacefully and regularly elected President. In 1864, 1868, and 1872 the election had turned in the last analysis on the employment of military force, or the threat of it. And again in 1876 the election hung upon returns from state governments that were maintained in power only by the employment of Federal troops for their protection. This time, however, there were large elements of the disappointed party who threatened to answer force with force rather than accept defeat as a result of the returns from the garrisoned Southern states. In the phraseology of the seventies, the question was, had American politics become permanently “Mexicanized” since 1860? 

A candid survey of recent history did not provide a reassuring answer to the question. 14 Reliance upon force as a means of solving political problems had become almost a habit. Not only did North and South employ force without stint against each other during four years of war, but each side resorted to force to repress criticism and dissent within its own borders. For a brief interlude after the war Lincoln and later Johnson sought to return to the old way of persuasion in dealing with the South. Their program was restoration instead of reconstruction, and their method was conciliation instead of coercion. Electorates based largely on ante-bellum qualifications, and therefore excluding the Negroes, chose delegates who revised the old state constitutions, and voters elected new legislatures , state officials, and congressmen. In August 1866 President Johnson announced hopefully that “peace, order, tranquility, and civil authority now exist in and throughout the whole of the United States.” 

The announcement was premature. Johnson had evaded the question of Negro suffrage and civil rights, avoided revolutionary social changes, and tolerated the election of old leaders to office. The program of moderation proved vulnerable to attack by radicals who sought deeper changes in Southern society . Shrewdly enlisting the support of humanitarians who were concerned purely with protecting the Negro, and combining them with economic interests that feared the return of Southern Democratic congressmen as a menace to newly won privileges, the Radical Republican faction captured control of Congress in the elections of 1866. 

Again coercion and force became the order of the day.Declaring the state governments created under Johnson nonexistent, the Radicals divided ten Southern states into five military districts and put them under the rule of major generals and an army of occupation. Frankly revolutionary in mood, Thaddeus Stevens and his followers overrode constitutional restraints right and left. They created a new electorate of more than 700,000 Negroes and pared down the white voters by disfranchisement to a total of some 627,000. The Radicals displaced six governors and supplanted thousands of lesser officials with their own men; they purged three legislatures of conservative members, threw out laws that displeased them, suppressed or ignored civil courts, denied the right to trial by jury, and violated freedom of press and speech. 

All this was done, of course, in the name of democracy. And in truth history does not record a more drastic application of the democratic dogma. In addition to the sudden creation of the new Negro electorate, the Radicals set up new state constitutions that were several leaps ahead of the old ones in a progressive direction. They reformed judicial procedure, court organization , and county organization, and established, on paper at least, a broad conception of the government’s responsibility for the people’s welfare that was new to the South. 

Reconstruction was, nevertheless, an unfair test of the democratic faith as well as an unfair test of the Negro’s capacity for self-government . Historically, revolutions of this magnitude have merely registered gains in economic power and social position that the emergent class had made prior to the revolution. This was not true of the freedmen. They had accumulated no such social and economic resources. They were not in command of their own revolution, nor did they “dominate” the whites. They were controlled, sometimes by sincere idealists, but too often by men who brought discredit upon the new governments. 

Radical state governments began to topple early, partly from internal weaknesses and partly from determined attacks of the Southern white opposition. The strategy of the opposition was to meet force with force, and the response of the Federal government was more force. Repeated intervention with troops kept states of the Lower South in Radical hands for a time, but by the end of 1874 all but four states had slipped in large measure out of their grasp. That year the Republicans lost control of the lower House of the national government. Their prospects for the next election were not encouraging. 

The Presidential election of 1876 stirred the country more deeply than any since 1860. It was the first election in two decades in which the major parties were of something like equal strength. An advantage of the Democrats lay in the series of congressional investigations of the Grant administration that had spread before the public a record of shameless graft and corruption permeating nearly all departments. So thoroughly had the reformers done their work of exposing the scandals of “Grantism” that Grant’s own party could only appeal to the voters in the centennial election on the ground that the next Republican administration would be completely unlike the previous one. Partisan passions on both sides, however, exaggerated the sharpness of the issues of the election. In Tilden, governor of New York, and Hayes, governor of Ohio, each party had nominated a reform candidate. And each of them

had written a reformer’s platform. The issue of reform, therefore, seemed to have been largely settled before the election. 

The Carpetbagger governments in the South shared the evil reputation earned among the reformers, independents , and Liberal Republicans by Grant’s administration in Washington. The reformers, offended by the Carpetbaggers’ record of corruption, did not stop to ask who bribed the Carpetbaggers, nor did they stop to reflect that the New York legislature, which had no Negro and Carpetbagger members, had probably been during the Reconstruction period as corrupt as any state legislature in the South. Nor were the reformers fair in blaming all Northern politicians operating in the South for the grave offenses undoubtedly committed by some of them. In this the influence of Redemption propaganda may be detected. If Reconstruction was a mixture of altruistic and selfish social motives, however, the Carpetbaggers reflected the same ambivalence. There were idealists as well as adventurers among them. But by 1876 the latter were the more conspicuous both on the local and on the national scene, and they contributed to the heavy burden of defense the Republican party had to bear in the Presidential election of that year. 15 

All over the country the first available election returns spread the conviction that Tilden was the President -elect. The returns had already settled virtually all the points on which the race was generally expected to hang. The Democrats had easily carried New York and by smaller margins the doubtful states of New Jersey, Connecticut , and Indiana. The Southern states were expected by all save the more hopeful Republicans to line up solidly behind Tilden. All except three of them, Florida, South Carolina, and Louisiana, were reported to have piled up safe Democratic majorities, and the Republican chairmen in Louisiana and Florida were rumored to have conceded those states to their opponents. Even without any votes from the three Southern states, Tilden had 184 electoral votes in the bag, only one short of the 185 required to elect. Hayes was trailing with only 166 electoral votes conceded. In popular votes Tilden, according to official returns later, led his opponent by more than a quarter of a million. In the face of these facts Zachariah Chandler, national Republican chairman, had closed up his New York headquarters and gone home under the belief that his party had gone down in defeat. Morning newspapers across the land, leading Republican journals among them, were rolling off the presses with the story of Tilden’s victory. 

Then in the early hours of the next morning William E. Chandler of New Hampshire and John C. Reid, managing editor of the Republican New York Times, awakened Zach Chandler at his hotel and got his permission to wire Republican officials in Florida , Louisiana, and South Carolina, asking if they could hold on to their states for Hayes. The scheme rested upon Republican control of the three state returning boards. If these partisan boards could “canvass” the returns and convert every one of the nineteen electoral votes of the three states into a Hayes vote, the Republican candidate would have exactly 185 votes, a majority of one. Later that day Zach Chandler boldly announced his claim that “Hayes has 185 electoral votes and is elected.” 

The audacity of the scheme made success appear improbable at first. But Hewitt, Chandler’s opposite number, took immediate steps to checkmate Republican moves. First he caused committees of prominent Democrats to proceed immediately to the Southern state capitals to watch over party interests in the canvassing of returns. His second move was a flanking maneuver. Although Oregon was clearly a Republican state, one of the party’s electors was a postmaster and therefore as a Federal officeholder disqualified under the Constitution from serving in the electoral college. The Democratic governor of the state promptly appointed an elector of his own party, having the next highest number of votes, to fill the vacancy. Hewitt intended by supporting this move to compel the Republicans in Congress to go behind official state returns in Oregon. In so doing they would pave the way for the Democrats to go behind 

the manipulations of the returning boards of Florida, South Carolina, and Louisiana, and undo their work. 

In the meanwhile Grant had sent Republican delegations to follow the Democratic observers to the three contested Southern states, and national attention became focused on the deep South. While the situation was different in each state, there were elements common to all of them. First there was the returning board, solidly Republican in each state save Florida, where there was one Democrat to two Republicans . Evidence of the dishonesty and corruptibility of members of these boards, especially that of Louisiana, is still pungent in the musty records of the seventies. Likewise there is ample evidence of irregularities, fraud, intimidation, and violence on the part of both Republicans and Democrats in the elections that the returning boards were to canvass. In some cases there was little to choose between the methods used by the two parties. Meeting in secret sessions and using illegal procedures, the Louisiana returning board threw out some 13,000 Democratic votes and 2000 Republican votes and thereby converted a substantial Tilden majority into a substantial Hayes majority. Three of the five members of the South Carolina board were candidates for office in the election on which they passed judgment. Their canvass gave the state’s Presidential electors to Hayes but the legislature and governorship to Wade Hampton and the Democrats. Flagrantly partisan and arbitrary decisions of the Florida board converted an apparent Tilden majority into Hayes votes. 

Speculation on the possible results of a perfectly fair election and a fair canvass of returns in the three states are inconclusive and highly hypothetical. Negro majorities in the population of South Carolina and Louisiana gave the Republicans their strongest claim to those states, though evidence points to a revolt against Carpetbagger control among some Negroes. A white majority and a rift in Republican ranks in Florida are prima facie evidence of the same kind for a Democratic claim to that state. The consensus of recent historical scholarship is that Hayes was probably entitled to the electoral votes of South Carolina and Louisiana, that Tilden was entitled to the four votes of Florida, and that Tilden was therefore elected by a vote of 188 to 181. There has been no tendency to defend the members of the electoral boards or the methods used to influence them. 16 

On the appointed day, December 6, the Republican electors of the three states met in their capitals and cast their votes for Hayes and Wheeler, while at the same time electors with certificates from rival Democratic state authorities met and delivered their ballots solidly for Tilden and Hendricks. On the face of state returns, which included one vote of Oregon for Tilden and the nineteen votes of the three contested Southern states for Hayes, the results stood Tilden 185 votes and Hayes 184. 

In partisan bitterness and suspicion Congress convened on December 4 and immediately reflected the dangerous cleavage of sentiment in the country. To Democratic shouts of “fraud” and “Tildenor-fight,” the Republicans retorted that they had been robbed of their Negro support by Democratic fraud in all Southern states and would yield no further. While the Democratic opinion among leaders , newspapers, and rank and file appeared to be completely solid in the conviction that the Republicans were out to steal the election and that Tilden’s claim was unassailable, there was less solidarity among Republicans. Such outstanding leaders as President Grant and Senator Roscoe Conkling of New York expressed their belief privately that

Tilden was the victor, and several party journals were wavering or openly doubtful. The great majority of the party, however, was as convinced of Hayes’s claims as the Democrats were of Tilden’s. 

The first act of the Democratic majority in the House of Representatives, after organizing and learning the results of the electoral count of December 6, was to appoint committees of investigation and dispatch them to the contested Southern states. The Senate, with a large Republican majority, followed suit by sending its committees southward. This was admittedly temporizing on both sides, for no solution could be expected by this means. 

The fact was nobody could suggest an acceptable solution to the problem that was now the critical one — the question of how to count the electoral votes. Neither the Constitution, nor the law and rules, nor precedent and custom offered an acceptable solution. The Twelfth Amendment to the Constitution declared that “the President of the Senate shall, in the presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the certificates and the votes shall then be counted.” But it did not say who should do the counting. If it would be done by the temporary president of the Senate, Thomas W. Ferry, as the Republicans contended, the result would obviously be a Hayes victory. If by the two houses acting jointly the count would go in favor of Tilden. Since neither candidate had a clear majority, Democrats demanded that the election be thrown into the House, as provided in another clause of the Twelfth Amendment. Republicans refused to consider this solution because of the Democratic control of the House. There were other disturbing questions to which the law gave no clear and unequivocal answer. Could Congress go behind the official state returns and inquire into fraud ? Or must these returns be accepted on their face? Reversing positions in the old state- rights dialogue, the Republicans solemnly demanded respect for state authority and the Democrats brushed it aside. Again, if no President were elected by March 4, who would succeed to power? And back of these questions the darker one — if it came to an appeal to force, where did the advantage lie? The Republicans had the regular army, but it was small and widely dispersed. On the other side were the Democratic governors in command of the National Guard. 

The year drew toward its close with no prospect of a break in the deadlock between the two Houses and the two parties. On December 13 both Hewitt and Chandler announced equally firm claims to the Presidency for their candidates. Debates became angrier on Capitol Hill and members began to arm themselves . Scenes on the floors of the two Houses reminded old-timers of the days of 1860–1861. It had been less than twelve years since the country was at war and memories of those days were always present in this crisis. 

1 Allan Nevins (ed.), Selected Writings of Abram S. Hewitt (New York, 1937), 156– 194. 

2 Milton H. Northrup, “A Grave Crisis in American History, The Inner History of the Origins and Formation of the Electoral Commission of 1877,” Century Magazine, LXII (1901), 923– 934. 

3 Henry Watterson, “The Hayes-Tilden Contest for the

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