Why is it that...

[Plumber]

In the Gilded Age, the Republicans are condemned for stealing the 1876 and 1888 elections, when if blacks had been able to properly vote they would've won? Well, I mean what the Republicans did was wrong, but it was much less wrong than disenfranchising millions of citizens on account of their color. They probably would have won in 1884 as well.

 

[Snake Featherston]

They are condemned because Northern white liberal sentiment was never very pro-civil rights for blacks. The white abolitionists were in the main backers of colonization, and once slavery was abolished, the sympathy Northern whites had for blacks left over from the Civil War rather rapidly disappeared, where Southern whites never forgave, forgot, or really changed their prejudices in any meaningful way. As a result, the white and black leaders who worked for civil rights were damned in history books for the next 100 years for what we, after the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s now see as good things.

 

[Mikestone8]

In the Gilded Age, the Republicans are condemned for stealing the 1876 and 1888 elections, when if blacks had been able to properly vote they would've won? Well, I mean what the Republicans did was wrong, but it was much less wrong than disenfranchising millions of citizens on account of their color. They probably would have won in 1884 as well.

Afaik they were not particularly condemned for "stealing" the 1888 election. They won without a plurality of the popular vote, but it was generally accepted that this was just how the system worked. Similarly, when in 1916 it appeared for a time that Hughes had won despite Wilson's larger popular vote, neither Wilson himself nor anyone else cried "foul" about it.

As for 1876, iirc the biggest complaint was about how the "nonpartisan" David Davis, who would have held the casting vote on the Electoral Commision, was removed (by getting Illinois to elect him to the Senate) in favour of a Republican, so that party could win all the disputes on a straight partisan vote. That was getting a bit blatant even for those days.

As for the question of Black disfranchisement, even those who disapproved of it would probably have mostly just responded that two wrongs didn't make a right.