The Year 1877
Newly elected President Rutherford B. Hayes takes office, but not without a considerable amount of contention. Following the election of 1876 the previous November, the results were in dispute.
There was no doubt that Samuel J. Tilden, a Democrat from New York, won the popular vote. It was the electoral votes that were unsettled. Hayes won 165 electoral votes and Tilden won 184 with
20 votes remaining unresolved.
In March of 1877 an informal compromise was struck. Democrats would yield the presidency to Hayes if the Republicans would agree to withdraw all remaining federal troops from the South. This
agreement, referred to as the Compromise of 1877 gave the Republicans the presidency but weakened their political power in the southern states. This action effectively ended the Reconstruction Era.
In April the first telephone line was installed connecting a workshop in Boston to the owner’s home in Somerville, Massachusetts. The telephones became number 1 and 2 for the Bell Telephone
Company. It wouldn’t be for another month before newly elected President Hayes would have the White House’s first telephone installed.
Thomas Edison creates one of his greatest inventions, the phonograph. The device recorded sound on tinfoil wrapped around a grooved cylinder. Although the sound quality was poor and the
tinfoil could only be played a few times, the invention made Edison a celebrity. Within a few years wax cylinders would be perfected and Edison would develop the phonograph into a commercial success.
Paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh was the first to ascribe fossil remains to the genus Allosaurus. Because of its large size and great
skull filled with dozens of sharp teeth, it became instantly fascinating to the public.
Outside America, Russian readers were treated to the final installment of a popular serial publication in The Russian Messenger. Leo Tolstoy’s
Anna Karenina was published over four years and was regarded as a superb work of realist fiction and perhaps one of the greatest novels ever
written. It would be several years before the first English translation was published.
Back home, a grass-roots movement was beginning. The Knights of Reliance first met in Lampasas County in Texas. Later to rename themselves The Farmers’ Alliance, they represented the start
of an organized agrarian economic movement among American farmers. Later the Farmers’ Alliance would move more heavily into politics and become the Populist Party, whose fervor in support of
a bimetallic standard in the 1890s would become legendary.
1877 also represents the beginning of the end of the double dime. The first sign of the demise of the denomination was evidenced when no more were ordered for circulation and only proofs were
requested for collectors. Then, a little later, the unissued twenty-cent pieces on hand at the Carson City Mint were ordered melted for coinage into other coins.
