The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896 (Oxford History of the United States)

by Richard White

The failure of Congress to pass appropriations for the army forced Hayes to call a special session in the fall of 1877. He not only did not get the appropriations—the Democrats would fund neither the army nor the civil service without riders repealing the civil rights laws—but also got much that he did not desire. Congress checked the federal power he had deployed to help the railroads. In 1877 the Democrats proposed a bill to prevent the use of federal troops as a posse comitatus, a civil force. They aimed to cripple civil rights enforcement. The bill failed, but antimonopolist Republicans and Democrats substituted a bill that allowed their use only when “expressly authorized by the Constitution.” This permitted the use of the army to protect suffrage rights and to protect the mails and enforce court orders, but not to intervene otherwise in labor disputes or to enforce revenue laws aimed at bootleggers.