The Devil's Own Work

by Barnet Schecter

  It also proved to be a major compromise of his political principles. Marble, the apostle of laissez-faire economics, who had fervently denounced railroad monopolies and government handouts that enabled them to grow, ended up selling his cherished newspaper to Thomas Scott, president of the Pennsylvania Railroad. In desperate financial straits, Marble was determined to sell to the highest bidder. His reluctance to part with the World and his distrust of Scott led to protracted negotiations.

  A clause in the sale agreement guaranteed Marble an additional one hundred thousand dollars if Congress endorsed the bonds of Scott's Texas and Pacific Railroad or approved any other guarantees to subsidize the notorious scheme. Since Democrats now controlled the House and generally opposed government subsidies, Scott needed to change their minds. By purchasing Marble's paper and his political influence, Scott clearly hoped to neutralize potential opponents, particularly Tilden.34

  With the loss of the World and the editorial pulpit which had given Marble some measure of independence within the Democracy when there were disagreements over policy, he increasingly became a mere party functionary, his identity enmeshed with that of the presidential contender. "You are Tilden, and he is M'arble," Samuel Barlow declared to him. "This is recognized everywhere."35 The paper was sold in May 1876, and in June Marble became a delegate to the Democratic convention. He drafted the platform the New York delegation brought with it to St. Louis, confident of Tilden's nomination.36

  The document declared "the Administration of the Federal Gov't to be in urgent need of Reform" and listed at length the "abuses, wrongs, and crimes" committed during Grant's tenure. Relegating the complex issues of Reconstruction to the past, the platform pledged to the American taxpayer a new dawn of pure government, which meant minimal government achieved through cuts in spending.37

  The Democrats had made the strategic decision to refrain from overt racial politics, but their program continued to undermine African Americans. Economy in government translated into slashing funds for the deployment of federal troops in the South, ending aid to former slaves through the Freedmen's Bureau, and imposing civil service reform, which would deprive blacks of government employment by mandating exams that amounted to literacy tests—even for jobs that required no such skills.38

  The Democrats' "Mississippi Plan" of murder and intimidation gave them control of the state in the elections of 1875, and as the country headed into the presidential race of 1876 only South Carolina, Louisiana, and Florida still had Reconstruction governments. Democrats controlled the House of Representatives, where they reduced the Justice Department's budget to hinder its enforcement of the Reconstruction amendments. Two Supreme Court rulings in 1876 had a similar impact by declaring that the enforcement provisions of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments did not give Congress authority to pass laws "for the suppression of ordinary crime within the States." The culprits in the Colfax, Louisiana, massacre of 1873 went free.39

  Further revelations of scandalous corruption in the Grant administration eroded Republican prestige and power in the North, while undercutting the few Reconstruction governments that hung on precariously in the South. Already tarred with the brush of corruption, whether they deserved it or not, the carpetbaggers would soon be swept away by an election in which reform was the Democratic buzzword. The presidential race of 1876 pitted Tilden against the Republican candidate, three-time Ohio governor and Civil War general Rutherford B. Hayes.40

  A Harvard-educated lawyer, Hayes volunteered for the army in 1861 and was appointed a major in the Twenty-third Ohio Regiment. His unit fought guerrillas in West Virginia, took part in the campaign leading up to Antietam, and helped capture John Hunt Morgan and his raiders in Ohio in July 1863. Wounded four times, Hayes had proved a fearless leader in battle, helping Sheridan rally his forces at Cedar Creek in 1864. Before Hayes left the army in 1865, he was promoted to the rank of major general in the U.S. Volunteers. Elected to Congress, the moderate Hayes found himself captivated by the forceful oratory of Thaddeus Stevens and supported the radical Republicans' Reconstruction program.

  Radicals in Ohio repaid him with the nomination for governor in 1867, and in his first two terms he led the fight to ratify the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments in his state. Pressured by his party to run again after a hiatus of four years, he was narrowly elected governor for the third time in 1875. Hayes's victory with a strident nativist message and hard-money platform signaled that the electorate was more concerned with currency, inflation, and other economic issues than with Reconstruction. Hayes reassured a friend in the South that northerners supported a "let alone policy" and felt "nothing but good will" toward the former Confederacy. Dismissed by one prominent critic as a "third-rate nonentity," Hayes had nonetheless emerged in 1876 as a moderate candidate acceptable to various Republican factions.41

  The contradictory Republican platform was deliberately vague, calling for both an end to bloodshed in the South and the enforcement of equal rights. While Hayes did not say so publicly, he intended to pursue a conciliatory policy toward moderate southern Democrats—former Whigs like himself— and bring them into the Republican party. It was the same approach another former Whig, Abraham Lincoln, had taken a dozen years earlier when he first launched the process of Reconstruction in 1863. Given the problems of "bayonet rule," Hayes viewed a coalition with moderates, and thorough reform of the corrupt Reconstruction governments, as the best hope for ending racial violence.42

  However, because of continued rioting and murders of blacks during the campaign, particularly in South Carolina, where Democrats and their "Red Shirt" paramilitary groups were pushing hard to topple the carpetbag government, northern outrage was rekindled briefly, and President Grant sent federal troops at the governor's request. Republicans, prompted by party leaders including Hayes, resorted to "waving the bloody shirt," which also served to distract voters from the depressed economy.43

  With most of the former slave states firmly in Democratic hands— "redeemed," according to white supremacists—and the remaining three overrun by the party's armed auxiliaries, the Tilden campaign looked forward to carrying the entire South. Tilden would then need only forty-seven electoral votes from the North to reach a total of 185 and win the election. Northern fatigue with "the everlasting Negro question" and the ongoing depression both worked in Tilden's favor. Moreover, despite federal protection and supervision of polling sites, rampant violence and intimidation cost the Republicans roughly a quarter of a million votes across the South. The Republican leadership quietly braced itself for defeat as the returns came in on November 7.44

  Tilden won New York, Connecticut, New Jersey, and Indiana, giving him far more than the forty-seven electoral votes he needed from the North. He almost swept the South, where Hayes won South Carolina by a slim margin, but the Democrats claimed victory there in the race for the governorship and control of the legislature. In the three states with Republican governments— Louisiana, Florida, and South Carolina—the returning boards that supervised the elections were controlled by carpetbaggers, and they challenged the grossly lopsided totals from areas where Democrats had evidently driven their opponents from the polls by threats and violence. Tilden, with 184 electoral votes, needed only one of the nineteen votes from the three disputed states to win. Hayes needed all of them.45

  Samuel Tilden

  Calling them "visiting statesmen," northern Democrats rushed delegations to the contested states to spread money around and prevent the Republican election officials from tampering with the ballots. Violence and intimidation by both sides during the campaign left Democrats and Republicans alike feeling justified in the extreme measures they were taking, particularly the Republicans, who denounced the Mississippi Plan used by the Democrats to keep blacks from voting. Florida's Republican governor received four companies of federal troops to maintain order.46

  Manton Marble arrived in Tallahassee, Florida, on November 15 and took charge of Democratic operatives, sending them around the
state to prevent Republican fraud while appealing to state election officials to move ahead with the vote count. Marble also filed reports to northern newspapers detailing Republican abuses. Telegrams between Marble and Tilden's nephew in New York reveal that Marble also planned to bribe election officials to ensure a Democratic victory. On December 2, Marble wrote that he had "just received a proposition to hand over at any hour required Tilden decision of Board and certificate for Governor for 200,000."47

  If Marble did proceed in this attempt, he failed, and on December 6, Florida's Board of Canvassers declared that all the Republican candidates had won. With similar results in the other two undecided southern states, Congress stepped in to count the electoral votes. The Democrats declared that the House, which they controlled, had the authority to discard the votes from the contested states and decide the election. The Republicans, on the other hand, asserted that the votes should be counted by the president of the Senate, the chamber which they controlled.48

  Democrats, including Fernando Wood, talked of using force to seat Tilden as president, creating fear that the country would be plunged back into civil war. Rumors spread that Copperhead rifle clubs were springing up in the North to join forces with southern paramilitary groups. Wood plotted legislative measures—including impeachment of President Grant for misuse of the army during the election—and the calling of new elections altogether in the disputed states. Grant in turn had the army discreetly deploy additional troops to Washington to maintain order.49

  However, Democratic businessmen, buffeted by the depression, favored a peaceful resolution of the crisis. Southern Democrats, distrustful of the party's northern wing—which had betrayed them by favoring peaceful secession and then joining the Union war effort in 1861—left it to the northerners to challenge the Republican election fraud. Fernando Wood and others like him were "invincible in peace and invisible in war," declared Congressman Benjamin Hill of Georgia.50

  Republicans exploited these divisions, and Democrats, including Tilden and Wood, acquiesced on January 18, 1877, when special House and Senate committees proposed the creation of an electoral commission to determine the outcome of the election, composed of eight Republicans and seven Democrats drawn from the three branches of government. Congress voted the commission into law. Congress was to meet in joint session, count the electoral returns from the states in alphabetical order, and the Electoral Commission was to rule on disputed returns.51*

  Much to the dismay of the Democrats, however, it soon became clear that the commission was voting along partisan lines to give Hayes the disputed states. Fernando Wood made a speech on the House floor upbraiding the commission. Working himself into a frenzy, he asked: "Why have they done this? This House demands to know why; the American people demand to know why; and history will ask, with wonder and amazement, why?" His venting did nothing to stop the Republicans, who proceeded with the vote count.52

  In the midst of these and other futile delaying tactics, the Democratic Speaker of the House, Samuel Randall of Pennsylvania, held a private conference at his home, after which he and Wood announced an astonishing reversal of their position: They would work to prevent any Democratic filibustering. Both men were aware that Hayes had opened channels to southern Democrats and was promising railroad subsidies and other funds for restoring and developing the South's infrastructure. Wood and Randall could see that their obstructionism was doomed and self-defeating. Their careers and ambitions would be better served by playing the role of statesmen instead of an embittered opposition. Moreover, Wood and Randall knew that Hayes favored home rule in the South.53

  The Republicans proceeded to give Hayes the presidency by a single electoral vote. In Washington, the electoral crisis ended not in an explosive, tragic confrontation but in farce on the House floor. When a Democratic representative from Maryland denounced Wood as "the high priest of the Republican party" for his treachery, "Mr. Wood raised his hands over Mr. O'Brien's head as if in the act of conferring a blessing," a reporter wrote. "The scene was so funny that the entire House broke out in loud roars of laughter."54

  Praised for his high-minded leadership by newspapers across the political spectrum, Wood had managed to pull off another unlikely political rebirth. Riding the Speaker's coattails, he had left the stain of his Civil War reputation in the past. In exchange for his support, which helped the Speaker retain his post, Wood was rewarded with the chairmanship of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee.55Southern Democrats soon got over their anger at Wood, whose racism reassured them that the caste system and home rule would be preserved in the former slave states. Hayes's conciliatory tone also suggested that blacks would be left to fend for themselves in a solidly Democratic South.56

  In the end, the unofficial agreement that came to be called the Compromise of 1877 had just that result. In April, the new Republican administration recognized the Democratic governors of Louisiana and South Carolina, in exchange for promises that they would protect the civil rights of blacks. Hayes then removed federal troops from New Orleans and Charleston, triggering the fall of the last carpetbag governments. Many northern Republicans decried the abandonment of southern blacks and predicted correctly that assurances of fairness from Democrats would soon be violated.57 "The whole South—every state in the South," declared one black southerner, "had got into the hands of the very men that held us as slaves." Another was dismayed to think "that Hayes could go back on us, when we had to wade through blood to help place him where he is now."58

  However, most of the country was content to have passed through the electoral deadlock peacefully and happy to see the end of bayonet rule imposed by the federal government on the states. Some black leaders, including Frederick Douglass, while unhappy with Hayes's action, at least refrained from criticizing the president. Reviewing the events of the previous two years, they concluded that Hayes had no alternative.59 As the Herald put it, Hayes was constrained to follow through with "what in the course of years has been done by his predecessor or by Congress."60

  Grant had begun the process of retreat from the South in 1875 when he declined to send troops to Mississippi and told the governor to make do with state militia. The Supreme Court rulings the following year had gutted the enforcement acts. Now, having already chopped the attorney general's budget to curtail enforcement of the Reconstruction amendments, House Democrats were vowing to cut military spending if Hayes dispatched troops to the South. "What is called the President's policy," said Douglass in May 1877, "might rather be considered the President's necessity . . . Statesmen often are compelled to act upon facts as they are, and not as they would like to have them."61

  Ironically, while northerners denounced the use of federal troops to protect blacks in the South as bayonet rule, they were eager for the army to put down labor unrest in their own states, which was coming to a head after ten years of union-building and four years of economic hard times since the Panic of 1873.62 The era of Reconstruction, which effectively began with the Emancipation Proclamation and the suppression of the draft riots in 1863, ended fourteen years later with a reversal of fortune for blacks, and military action against another massive working-class protest: a nationwide railroad strike. Thus, 1877 appeared to be a year of ultimate defeat for the goals of both the draft rioters and their black victims. This time, however, while the railroad strike reinforced class antagonisms, it engendered solidarity between black and white workers, sowing the seeds for broader cooperation in the future.63

  Only ten nationwide labor unions had emerged intact from the Civil War, but within a decade there were more than thirty. Inflation eased after the wrar, while economic expansion increased the demand for workers. Their bargaining power grew, as did the number of strikes for higher wages and shorter hours.64 As it had before and during the Civil War, the northern labor movement called for equal rights but remained hostile to black workers, Chinese immigrants, and women, who formed their own unions.65

  Whites continued to fear black labor compe
tition, even though the threatened influx of former slaves to urban centers in the North would not occur until early in the next century, since freedmen in the South, accustomed to agriculture, not factory work, migrated mainly to the West, settling in Arkansas and Oklahoma.66 Black workers remained loyal to the Republican party and pinned their hopes on Reconstruction, while white labor leaders denounced the carpetbaggers and the Freedmen's Bureau and called for reconciliation with the South in order to spur cotton production and create related jobs in the North.67

  With the panic and depression in 1873, wages fell along with prices, and unemployment became rampant, leading to the collapse of labor unions, cooperatives, and the few local laws ensuring an eight-hour day. Chanting "Work or Bread," the jobless staged huge protests in cities across the North in the winter of 1873-74 to demand public works projects—on streets, parks, and urban transit systems—or simply public relief. On January 13, 1874, some seven thousand workers rallied at Tompkins Square in New York, where club-wielding policemen, some on horseback, attacked and scattered the protesters while making numerous arrests. New York's harsh response to the demonstration crushed the campaign for public works and spawned a crackdown on labor rallies in cities across the North.68

  Organized labor began to fragment, with many German immigrants looking toward socialist solutions, including nationalization of the railroads and other industries. Skilled American craftsmen, particularly those in Pittsburgh's iron and steel industry, distanced themselves from the growing public perception of organized labor as a collection of violent communists and anarchists. Avoiding clashes with employers and the police, they focused instead on the survival of their unions and preserving decent wages and working conditions. Closing ranks, skilled workers shunned the unemployed, who were often used as strikebreakers, and severed ties with unions of unskilled laborers.69