TWISTS AND TURNS
The tumultuous election of 1876. Spoiler alert: We came close to major civil strife.
On ElectionDay in 1876, the Republican Party chairman went to bed thinking the party’s presidential candidate had lost. In a preliminary vote count, the Democratic candidate’s lead seemed impossible for the Republican nominee, RutherfordHayes, to overcome.
A Tribune correspondent reported scenes of jubilation on the streets of the nation’s capital at 3 a.m.: “Large mobs of drunken Democrats aremaking night hideous with bands of music and howls of exultation.”
Then someone at the Republican Party’s headquarters inNewYork hit upon this realization: IfHayes, Ohio’s governor, won South Carolina, Florida and Louisiana— where Republicans controlled the voting process— without losing any other states in theNorth, hewould have a one-vote majority in the Electoral College.
So Republican staffers sent out telegrams urging Republican officials to hold their states forHayes. When the party chairmanwoke up, he reported: “Hayes has 185 electoral votes and is elected.”
Democratswere incensed. Overnight, the election had gone from their candidate, NewYorkGov. Samuel Tilden, being the apparent victor, to a mathematical possibility that he could lose to the other guy winning by one electoral vote.
“But now, when it became apparent that the resultwould be disputed, the entire people, under apprehension of civil strife, took alarm and became more concerned than in any preceding election involving the Presidency,” the Tribune wrote in a post-mortem review of the of most controversial election in American history.
For months, therewere charges and countercharges of voting fraud. Until virtually the eve of the inauguration, then March 5, itwas unclear which of the two, Hayes or Tilden, would take the oath of office. Therewere threats of armed partisans marching onWashington to settle the dispute.
OnNov. 24, a Tribune correspondent sent a dispatch fromNewYork. “The state of suspense in whichwe have been in regarding the result of the Presidential election has given rise to considerable uneasiness,” hewrote. “Many affect to believe that, in the event of Gov. Hayes’ being declared lawfully elected, his inauguration will lead to revolution.”
In the paranoia of the moment, ordinary events seemed to signal conspiracies. When Tilden’s nephew bought several copies of the Robert Slater book “Telegraphic Code, to Ensure Secrecy in the Transmission of Telegrams,” the Tribune suggested itwas going to be used to send stealthy, malevolent instructions to Democratic operatives inOregon, where there was an election dispute.
As proof, the Tribune noted that when a NewYork bookstore clerk showed Tilden’s nephew a different code book, he replied that Slater’swas “the safest.”
In Oregon, the problemwas that while Hayeswon the popular vote and thus the state’s three electors, one of themwas a county postmaster. TheU.S. Constitution provides that no “Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under theUnited States, shall be appointed Elector.”
In South Carolina, Florida and Virginia, rival state officials sent dueling lists of presidential electors toWashington. The Constitution provides that the president of the Senate opens the envelopes, “and the Votes shall then be counted.”
But with a Republican and a Democratic list froma state lying on his desk, which
one should the president of the Senate open? There, the Constitution is silent.
The bitter conflicts over such questions were intensified because the election of 1876was a de facto plebiscite on the Civil War and Reconstruction of the previous decade.
Tilden had opposed slavery and been loyal to theUnion during the CivilWar. But running as a Democrat in 1876, he bore the same party label as Abraham Lincoln’s opponents had in 1860. Thatwas enough to make him suspect in the eyes of the Tribune, which had groomed Lincoln for his presidential run.
On the eve of the election, the Tribune issued a direwarning:
“The election of Tilden means a renewal of theWar … with Tilden as President, defending secession and the sovereignty of the seceding States.”
On the other side of the aisle, some Republicans had come to regret the obligations their party had assumed during the
CivilWar and its aftermath. In 1863, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation marked the beginning of the end of slavery in America. The 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution made Black people citizens and gave Black men the vote.
But in the South, which fought a bloody war to preserve slavery, itwas obvious that Black people’s civil rights required an occupying army to enforce them. Yet even the presence of federal troops didn’t prevent white vigilantes fromintimidating Black voters on election days.
Politically motivated violence enabled the white Democratic Party of Louisiana to win the state in the 1868 election, three years after the CivilWar, even though the biracial Republican Party had 25,000 more registered voters, as the Tribune reported:
“The disbanded Confederate regiments were reorganized asKu-Klux clubs, and with arms in their hands and horrid threats, backed up by a few hundred midnight murders, struck such terror into the blacks andUnion whites that they absented themselves from the polls and surrendered the State to theKu-Klux.”
In 1874, awhite militia seizedNew Orleans’ city hall and statehouse. It took federal troops, reluctantly dispatched by President Ulysses Grant, to suppress the rebellion. Grant’s vacillation reflected the glacial shift ofNorthern Republicans fromconsidering Reconstruction a moral obligation to thinking it an electoral handicap.
Some party leaders had bought into white Southerners’ thesis that Black peoplewere uncivilized. Others felt that, with the economy in a downturn, voterswould be more responsive to bread-and-butter promises than ethical hectoring.
In his letter of acceptance of the 1876 Republican nomination, Hayes pledged the federal government’s support “for the efforts of the people of those States, to obtain for themselves the blessings of honest and capable local government.” It was a coded message to the South about ending Reconstruction.
But before any campaign promises could be redeemed, the election’s winner had to be decided. So in late January 1877, Congress established an Electoral Commission.
“It means peace, good-will, and prosperity,” the Tribune predicted with an editorial sigh of relief.
The commissionwas to be composed of 15 members— five fromthe Senate, the House and the Supreme Court. That resulted in the appointment of seven Democrats and seven Republicans, with Justice DavidDavis an independentmember, who was known for his fondness for political intrigue.
Democrats in the Illinois legislature madeDavis aU.S. senator, thinking he would support their candidate. Instead, he resigned fromthe commission. All the justices who might replace himwere Republicans, which guaranteed a Republican majority on the commission. All contested claimswere decided by an 8-to-7 vote, makingHayes the president.
Democrats cried foul, but in muted tones. Meeting secretly at aWashington hotel, representatives of the two parties made an unholy deal: The Democrats would acceptHayes’ election, and the Republicanswould end Reconstruction.
That gave white Southerners a free hand to re-subjugate their Black neighbors, whose nameswere stricken fromthe voter rolls and schools, and decent jobswere closed to them. They lived in daily peril should they step over the line of Jim Crow segregation.
The Compromise of 1877, as itwent into the history books, rewarded both parties: The Democrats enjoyed one-party rule in the South. Freed of its anti-slavery heritage, the Republicans became the party of the industrializingNorth. Neither party’s regional dominationwould be seriously challenged for a century.
Black peoplewere the designated losers of the “bargain.” Their lives long remained as constricted as when formerUnion soldier and Alabama legislator CharlesHarris described them in 1877. Hewrote to a friend:
“We obey laws; others make them. We support state educational institutions, whose doors are virtually closed against us. We support asylums and hospitals, and our sick, deaf, dumb, or blind aremet at the doors by invidious distinctions and unjust discriminations.”