The election of Rutherford B Hayes in 1876 was both one of the most corrupt and most convoluted elections in US history.
"Hidden History" is a diary series that explores forgotten and little-known areas of history.
The American election of 1876 took place at a complicated time. It was the 100th anniversary of independence, but the nation had barely survived. The Civil War had ended just 11 years previously, and there was still much tension between former Unionists and Confederates. Federal troops had occupied the South after the war, and Reconstruction had attempted to forcibly remove the social and political influence of the slave-owning aristocracy—and had largely failed. The anti-slavery Republican Party had won both Presidential elections after the Civil War, but the Democratic Party, which still harbored pro-South sentiments, now held Congress and hungered for a return to power. Ulysses S Grant, the Union General who had won the war, was President, but he proved to be a much better general than a politician, and he had surrounded himself with an administration that was wracked by corruption and scandal. What the exhausted voting public wanted, above all, was an end to conflict and corruption, and a return to good government and a normal life.
Both parties were running candidates that were bland but honest.
The Republicans had held their convention in Cincinnati. The delegates were split between Maine’s Representative James Blaine and New York Senator Roscoe Conkling. After deadlocking hopelessly for six ballots, the delegates turned elsewhere, and began to coalesce around Ohio’s relatively obscure Governor Rutherford B Hayes. Hayes was an affable and inoffensive politician who had been wounded four times in the Civil War and finished as a General, and on the seventh ballot he won the nomination. His campaign would center on the themes of ending corruption and reforming the civil service.
At their convention in St Louis, the Democratic Party quickly nominated New York’s long-serving Governor Samuel Tilden. Tilden was also considered to be scandal-free (though at age 62 he was a lifelong bachelor and there were cartoons in some newspapers depicting him in a dress, with implications that were obvious), and he had devoted much effort as a public attorney to opposing the corrupt Democratic political machine in Tammany Hall led by “Boss” Tweed. His campaign, too, focused on honest dealing and ending bribery and scandal. And, after eight years of corruption under the Republican Grant Administration, it was widely expected that Tilden would win.
With both candidates running on essentially the same platforms, though, it is probably no surprise that the campaign ended up centering around emotion-based exhortations. Although Tilden was a Northerner, the Democrats ran on a none-too-subtle campaign of white supremacy in the South, focusing their efforts on former Confederates and waving the old banner of “states’ rights” (and everyone knew what that meant). The former Confederates also unleashed the Ku Klux Klan to intimidate African-American voters. The Republicans, meanwhile, also wanted to revisit the Civil War, and appealed to Union veterans by reminding them that “not every Democrat was a rebel, but every rebel was a Democrat” and urging them to “vote as you shot”. And both sides maintained political machines and bosses who practiced the fine American art of election fraud, and who had perfected every dirty trick in the book including ballot stuffing, vote buying, and suppression.
Under Grant’s program of Reconstruction, moreover, most of the former Confederate states had already been “redeemed” and allowed to run their own state governments. But three—South Carolina, Florida and Louisiana—were still occupied by Union troops, and although they were allowed to rejoin the Union, their state governments were still legally under Federal oversight.
There was no electronic vote-counting in those days and no exit polls, so it often took a while to count all the votes and determine who had won an election. But when Tilden and Hayes went to sleep on the night of the election in November, Tilden was ahead by over a quarter-million votes, and both candidates went to bed believing that Tilden had won.
And then strange things began happening.
As the vote counts continued to come in through the night, it was realized that, while Tilden was widely ahead in the popular vote, in the all-important Electoral College he had not yet clinched a majority of the electoral votes—and if Hayes could carry three states which had not reported yet (which happened to be the “unredeemed” states of Louisiana, Florida and South Carolina), he could still win the election.
Both parties now dispatched telegrams to their officials in those three states, hurriedly followed by lawyers, and the circus began. Both parties, reportedly armed with wads of cash to be used for bribery, claimed to have found reams of fraudulent votes which they could reject, and now both parties were claiming to have won each of the three states—and thus the national election.
In the meantime, Oregon had originally slated its electoral votes for Hayes as the popular vote winner. But then the Democratic Governor, LaFayette Grover, removed one of the state’s Republican Electoral College representatives on a technicality and replaced him with a Democrat, which switched the majority and now gave the state’s electoral votes to Tilden. It was enough to give Tilden a clear win in the Electoral College—unless Hayes was able to win all three of the disputed Southern states.
Under the electoral laws of the time, it was up to each state’s “Returning Board” to officially count the votes and determine the winner. These Boards were appointed by the state’s Governor—and the Governors in all three of these states were Republicans. To the surprise of absolutely no one, these Returning Boards threw out enough “fraudulent” Democratic votes to give their states’ electoral votes to the Republicans—thereby making Hayes the winner. (In Florida, the margin was less than 100 votes.) Also to the surprise of absolutely no one, the Democratic Party screamed and yelled and accused the “Overturning Boards” themselves of fraudulently throwing out valid votes. In all three states, then, two bodies met, each claiming to be the “legitimate” Returning Board and each awarding their state’s electoral votes to a different candidate.
So the matter went to the US Senate. On December 6, the Senate met to certify the election results, which was usually a routine matter. However, Florida, South Carolina and Louisiana had each submitted two certifications, one for each candidate. Once again a fight broke out. Under the electoral rules of the time, it was unclear what should happen next. Under the Constitution, the President of the Senate (which was Republican Senator Thomas Ferry, Grant’s Vice President having died the year before and not been replaced) was directed to open the votes for a count, but it was unclear who would then get to decide which votes to count. The Republicans naturally now argued that it was the Republican Ferry, as Acting President of the Senate, who should decide which certifications to accept, while the Democrats argued that it should be the majority members of Congress (which happened to be Democratic) which should get to decide which were valid.
The Grant Administration, meanwhile, took steps in case violence broke out over the election. The commanding general of the Army, Grant’s old subordinate William T Sherman, arrived in Washington to take charge of the city’s defenses, and troops were dispatched to a number of other cities in case they were needed to quell riots. This in turn led to wild conspiracy theories that Sherman’s army would seize control of the government and install the General’s brother, Senator John Sherman, as President in a military coup. Counter-rumors declared that a force of Democratic Party “rifle clubs” was marching on the Capitol to forcibly install Tilden as the winner. This in turn prompted Tilden to issue a statement condemning any such plan, saying “it would lead to the destruction of free government”.
With the electoral rules unclear, though, and in a time when the public was already sick and tired of machine politics and corruption, both parties wanted to avoid at least the appearance of underhandedness (though of course both parties were willing to practice it). So a compromise was reached on January 17, 1877 (two months after the election): Congress would appoint a commission consisting of equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans plus one nonpartisan independent—Supreme Court Justice David Davis, an idealist who had not even voted in the election.
Then, in another oddity, the Democratic-controlled Illinois State Legislature quickly elected Davis to the US Senate (at that time there was no direct election of Senators). Presumably this was an attempt to manipulate Davis into voting for Tilden, but it backfired: Davis instead stepped down from the commission. After much wrangling, he was replaced by Joseph Bradley, a moderate Republican who was serving as Chief Justice for the New Jersey State Supreme Court, and who as a judge could, it was presumed, act impartially.
In effect, it was Bradley who would single-handedly decide the next President of the United States.
On February 1, as Acting Senate President Ferry began the legal process of opening and counting the votes, he reached “Florida” with its two certifications and formally turned the matter over to the commission. The Democrats argued that the commission had the legal authority to investigate the certifications from the three states and determine for itself whether the count was fair: the Republicans argued that the count had to be accepted as is. After six days of debate, Bradley made his decision: since, he said, the state’s Returning Board had sole legal authority to officially count the votes, no one else had any authority to overturn those results. That gave the three states’ electoral votes—and the election—to Rutherford B Hayes.
The Democrats still had one weapon remaining, however. If they filibustered the final vote certification in the Senate, they could delay the entire electoral process until March 4, when the electoral commission’s mandate would expire. If no President had been legally certified by then, it was argued, the election would go to the House of Representatives, where the Democrats held the majority.
Everybody in both parties knew, however, that this would cause immense chaos and could throw the legitimacy of the entire electoral process in doubt. The Republican Party quickly offered a backroom deal to the Democrats: if they agreed to allow Hayes to take office, Hayes would remove all of the remaining Union troops from the Southern states and end Reconstruction. The deal was largely symbolic, since Congress had already cut off funding for the troops, but it signaled that the Southern Democrats would now be free to carry out their regressive program of racial repression without any interference from the Federal Government. It laid the foundation for 100 years of segregation and Jim Crow.
Hayes was sworn in as President on March 4. To try to smooth all of the ruffled political feathers, he immediately announced that he would only serve out one term and would then not seek re-election. In effect, he made himself a lame duck upon taking office. He became known as “Rutherfraud B Hayes”, and his term would be one of the least effective in US history.
NOTE: As some of you already know, all of my diaries here are draft chapters for a number of books I am working on. So I welcome any corrections you may have, whether it's typos or places that are unclear or factual errors. I think of y'all as my pre-publication editors and proofreaders. ;)