Puny in population back in 1876, Florida loomed large in election
In this 21st century, Florida and its 29 electoral votes come up a lot in political pundits’ talk about U.S. elections, but that’s nothing new. Way back in 1876— our nation’s centennial year— Florida also grabbed the spotlight.
Wewere puny in population then, if large in land and potential. Florida ranked 33rd among the states in population in the 1870 census, with our count of 187,748 falling just behind Rhode Island at No. 32.
In 1876, Florida had only four electoral votes. Yet the state’s returns became “the critical pivot on which the national election turned,” as historian Gloria Jahoda has noted.
Thiswas only 11 years after the CivilWar ended and three years after a financial panic in 1873. Scandals had plagued Ulysses S. Grant’s two administrations, and rather than nominating him for a third term (which was possible then), Republicans had turned to Ohio’s governor, Rutherford B. Hayes, while the Democrats tapped Samuel J. Tilden, New York’s reform-minded governor who had battled the Tweed Ring. A third party, the Greenbacks, joined in the fray.
The wild frontier
Fraud ran so deep that it’s impossible to really know who legitimately won, Orlando historian James C. Clark has noted. “In many rural areas, whites prevented black Republicans from casting ballots,” he writes. This would be the election that ended Reconstruction.
In Central Florida, awild and woolly frontier in the 1870s, charges of ballot-stuffing surfaced in Kenansville, nowin Osceola County. Thiswas theworld in which Orange County’s Republican-backed sheriff, David Mizell, had been killed in an ambush a few years earlier, becoming the first Florida sheriff to die in the line of duty.
In those days, voters weren’t registered, and cheating was common on all sides. The1876 results were confused and confusing in Florida. The state’s first count showed Hayes ahead by only 43 votes. After a month, a GOP-dominated state review board declared him the winner.
But Florida, along with South Carolina and Louisiana, sent double returns to Washington: one set from the Republicans and one from the Democrats. When a federal election commission made up of eight Republicans and seven Democrats was appointed to sort out the mess, the vote on every issue was 8 to 7, and the saga dragged on after the November election until March.
President by bargain
When it became clear the commission was going to go for Hayes, Southern Democrats agreed to accept his presidency in return for a bargain. Hayes would remove the last of the federal troops fromthe South, which meant the end of both Reconstruction and the power of Black officeholders such as Josiah T. Walls, a former Union soldier who had become Florida’s first Black congressman in1870.
On March 2, the national commission announced its final decision: 185 electoral votes for Hayes, including Florida’s four, and184 for Tilden— the clear winner in the popular vote.
The tension and fighting around the election was so bad that Hayes secretly took the oath of office on Saturday, March 3, 1877, in the Red Room of the White House.
Hayes honored his pledge not to seek a second term and retired to his home, Spiegel Grove, in Fremont, Ohio. In1880, the GOP looked to another Ohioan as its standard bearer: James Garfield, whowas assassinated less than four months after taking office by a disgruntled federal office seeker, thrusting Chester Arthur into the presidency.
Thatwas only 15 years after Lincoln’s death. Looking back on those years of turmoil, it seems remarkable the national fabric held together. “To give victory to the right, not bloody bullets, but peaceful ballots only, are necessary,” Lincoln said.
Jim Clark includes the state’s role in the disputed election of 1876 among his book, “200 Quick Looks at Florida History.” His latest book, “A History Lover’s Guide to Florida,” has just been published by the History Press; we’ll return to it in a future Flashback.