The battle over Arthur amounted to only one front in Hayes’s conflict with the Stalwarts. As the Stalwarts predicted, Hayes’s Southern policy created a series of catastrophes for the Republicans and black voters. Even before 1876, new Democratic governments had begun to call constitutional conventions. The conventions did not focus on officially eliminating the black civil rights Southerners had promised Hayes they would protect. In principle the conventions left civil rights untouched, even as state governments constricted them in practice. Instead, the conventions concentrated on the
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