When I was growing up, I always thought it curious that 1776 was considered our founding year. Yes, that was the year we declared our independence from the mother country, but I thought that the adoption of our Constitution was a better marker for our birth as a nation.
But what do I know?
In any case, 1876 was deemed the centennial year and there were celebrations, and multitudes came to Philadelphia to see the Centennial Exposition.
And of course being divisible by four, 1876 was also a leap year and an election year.
And what an election it was!
Fasten your seat belts, kids, it’s gonna be a bumpy ride, to misquote Margo Channing.
Though Grant was still personally popular, the scandals of that had plagued his administration led the Republicans to search for a fresh candidate. Rutherford B. Hayes, Governor of Ohio and in favor of civil service reform, got their nod.
Meanwhile, the Democrats had an even better candidate in the DA who broke up the Boss Tweed gang and sent them all to prison, New York Governor Samuel J. Tilden.
Hayes and Tilden pretty much agreed on every issue, so the campaign was fought on scandals (from the Grant administration and from the carpetbagging governments in the South) and the lingering hard feelings from the Civil War. Robert G. Ingersoll, the “Great Agnostic”, campaigned for Hayes: “Every man that endeavored to tear the old flag from the heavens that it enriches was a Democrat. Every man that tried to destroy this nation was a Democrat. … The man that assassinated Abraham Lincoln was a Democrat…. Soldiers, every scar you have on your heroic bodies was given you by a Democrat!”
(I wonder how modern Republicans would feel about a famous agnostic/atheist campaigning for them today?!)
The Democrats accused Hayes of stealing the pay of dead soldiers in his Civil War regiment, cheating Ohio out of huge amounts of money while governor, and that he shot his mother “in a fit of insanity”. Tilden was smeared with just about every name in the book; he was a called a thief, liar, drunkard, syphilitic, and swindler, and he got nicknames like Slippery Sammy, Soapy Sam, Ananias Tilden. (You’ll find the source of Ananias in Acts 5.)
On November 7 the voters went to the polls, and initially it looked like Tilden had won with a quarter of a million more votes (4,300,000) than Hayes (4,036,000). The Electoral College also seemed to favor Tilden with 184 to only 165 for Hayes, but 185 were needed to win. There were 20 EVs yet to be decided: South Carolina’s 7, Louisiana’s 8, Florida’s 4, and one of Oregon’s 3. Tilden only needed one of them to win.
So the Supreme Court stepped in and gave them all to Hayes!
Oh, no, wrong election. Sandra Day “I wanna be replaced by a Republican Prez” O’Connor wasn’t around yet to pull her political shenanigans.
What actually happened was a lot more convoluted and things dragged out until March.
Tilden was certain he had won, and Hayes called him to concede thought so as well.
But they hadn’t reckoned on Zachariah Chandler, the chairman of the Republican national committee. Chandler and his cronies claimed Oregon’s three votes for Hayes, and they sent telegrams to officials in the three southern states asking for their help. The next day Chandler claimed that Hayes had won the 185 electoral votes and was elected. Both parties sent men to the three states investigate. Grant sent more troops to the three states to preserve the peace.
Only one of the disputed votes—Oregon’s—was Hayes’s, as a majority of its voters had voted Republican; but there was a problem. One of the three electors, J. W. Watts, was not eligible as he was a postmaster and the U.S. Constitution forbade federal officeholders from serving as electors. Oregon’s Democratic Governor replaced Watts with a Democrat and sent one Tilden and two Hayes electors to Washington.
That’s when Watts decided to resign from his postmaster position and joined up with the original two Republican electors and the three of them headed to Washington to cast three votes for Hayes.
But the election games were not all on one side. In the three southern states Democrats had intimidated Black voters to keep them from voting; Republicans used federal troops to see to it that as many Blacks voted as possible. Who actually would have won a free and fair election?
With agents from both parties on the scene after the election, two sets of returns (one for each candidate) were sent from Louisiana and South Carolina, and three, count ’em three, (two for Tilden and one for Hayes) were sent from Florida.
I’ll let Paul Boller in Presidential Campaigns take it from here:
It was now up to Congress to decide which sets of returns from the four disputed states were valid. The Constitution states that “the president of the Senate shall, in the presence of the Senate and the House of Representatives, open all certificates, and the votes shall then be counted,” but does not outline procedures in case of conflicting returns from any state. The House of Representatives, with a Democratic majority since 1874, balked at letting the president of the Senate, controlled by the Republicans, make the decisions; but the Republican Senate was equally opposed to throwing the final decision about the election into the Democratic House of Representatives. After weeks of acrimonious debate, the two houses finally agreed to set up an Electoral Commission to decide which candidate had won the disputed votes. The Commission was composed of five Senators, five Representatives, and five Supreme Court justices; seven of them were Republicans and seven Democrats. The fifteenth member was to be justice David Davis, regarded as an independent, but at the last minute he was elected to the U.S.Senate by the Illinois legislature and became ineligible. Justice Joseph Bradley took his place; though a Republican, he was expected to maintain some semblance of nonpartisanship. But he didn’t; he ended up voting with his Republican colleagues on every crucial issue. The result was that by a vote of eight to seven, the Electoral Commission awarded all the disputed electoral votes to Hayes, giving him 185 votes to Tilden’s 184, and making him President.
Many Democrats, especially in the North, were outraged by the work of the Electoral Commission. The Cincinnati Enquirer called it “the monster fraud of the century,” the New York Sun put black borders on its pages to mourn the demise of democracy, and a Washington paper even suggested doing away with Hayes. “Fraud has triumphed, and triumphed through the treachery of Democrats,” cried the Washington Union, a Tilden campaign paper. “Honest men or irresolute nature and dull perceptions have assisted, but corruption led the way.” In the House of Representatives the Democrats passed a resolution over Republican opposition proclaiming that Tilden had been “duly elected President of the United States”; and in eleven states Democrats began organizing “Tilden-Hendricks Minute-Men” clubs, arming themselves with rifles, and shouting, “On to Washington!” and “Tilden or blood!”
Tilden did not encourage resistance to the Electoral Commission’s decision; and Southern Democrats remained on the whole conciliatory. Southern whites knew that Hayes was friendly to them and that in his letter accepting the Republican nomination he had recommended ending military reconstruction. Who knows? Perhaps Southern businessmen, many of them former Whigs, could get more out of a Republican President than out of Tilden, a pennypincher, whose slogan was “Retrenchment and Reform.” At a series of secret meetings while the Electoral Commission was still at work, Southern Democratic leaders reached a compromise with Northern Republicans: they agreed to accept the decision of the Electoral Commission in return for pledges that Hayes would pull federal troops out of Louisiana and South Carolina (the two remaining Republican carpetbag governments), appoint at least one Southerner to his Cabinet, and support federal aid to education and internal improvements for the South. The Compromise of 1877, as the informal understanding came to be called, killed all suggestions for a filibuster by the Democrats in Congress and ended the crisis. On the morning of March 2, Senator Thomas W. Ferry of Michigan, the president of the Senate (Vice-President Henry Wilson had died), made the announcement: “Rutherford B.Hayes, having received the majority of the whole number of electoral votes, is duly elected President of the United States for four years commencing on the 4th of March, 1877.”
Not all Democrats were reconciled. Some of them contemptuously dismissed Hayes as “Rutherfraud Hayes”, “the Fraudulent President,” the “Usurper,” “the Boss Thief,” and “Old 8 to 7.” Tilden himself acquiesced in the decision for Hayes, but to the end of his life believed he had been the real winner. In the spring of 1878 the House of Representatives launched an investigation of the election which brought to light flagrant instances of Republican bribery in the South; but revelations that Tilden men had also made bribe offers blunted the committee’s findings to some extent.
So after all that, what kind of president did Old Rutherfraud turn out to be?
Eh.
It makes one wonder, why did he bother?
