Not that it was all Johnson’s fault. Abraham Lincoln was assassinated on April 14, 1865—among the most tumultuous and confusing times in American history. General Lee had surrendered to Ulysses Grant at the Appomattox Courthouse and the war was over—good news indeed—but now what to do? Many Radical Republicans, who had felt Lincoln was going to be too kind to the South, thought that Johnson should put down the hammer on the defeated rebels.
But Johnson quickly announced that he would follow the path laid down by Lincoln. He set the steps for Reconstruction by calling a general amnesty for all Confederate combatants, accepting back into the Union the “restored loyal governments” of Tennessee, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Virginia, and moved to restore the civil governments of the other seven Southern states once they rewrote state constitutions to revoke slavery.
Johnson also put into place the so-called Black Codes—a very limited form of freedom for ex-slaves, which did not allow them to vote or acquire property. The Radicals wanted full civil rights for former slaves, including the right to vote.
Since Radicals controlled Congress after midterm elections, they set about voting down every one of Johnson’s Reconstruction bills. When the president vetoed Congress, they overrode his veto. The battling got so intense that the Republicans finally assembled enough votes to impeach Johnson in the spring of 1868. They failed to convict by just one vote, but the president was effectively finished.
The Republican Party’s new standard-bearer was Ulysses S. Grant, the plain-spoken hard-drinking former general whose dogged tactics and brilliant strategizing had won the war for the Union. His stature in America at the time is comparable to that of Dwight D. Eisenhower after the Second World War—the man was an icon. On May 20, four days after Johnson’s impeachment trial, Grant was nominated for president at the Republican convention in Chicago. The vice-presidential nod went to Speaker of the House Schuyler Colfax.
But now the Radicals in the Republican Party, facing a national election, waffled on the “Negro question”: full suffrage for freed blacks was supported, but it was declared that each state should be in charge of voting it in—an iffy process at best.
The Democrats—a party many now equated with the Confederacy—met in New York on July 4 in blazing hot weather. After twenty-one ballots, no candidate could be agreed on, and a dark-horse nominee was engineered by Samuel Tilden, the aggressive head of the New York delegation: New York Governor Horatio Seymour.
The reluctant Seymour became overwhelmed, first mounting the platform to decline the nomination in inadvertent rhyming couplet (“May God bless you for your kindness to me, but your candidate I cannot be.”), then bursting into tears backstage (“Pity me … pity me!”) before finally accepting the job. His running mate was Francis Blair.
The Democrats stood on a platform opposing the harsh Reconstruction plans formulated by the Radical Republican Congress, wherein Southern states were organized into five military districts and corrupt legislatures, and the state governments were set up, which soon swarmed with carpetbaggers.
THE CANDIDATES
REPUBLICAN: ULYSSES S. GRANT The forty-six-year-old Grant, was of course, a legend—his career the stuff of American dreams. After graduating from West Point and serving in the Mexican War, he went through a period of obscurity in his father’s Galena, Illinois, leather store before rejoining the army at the beginning of the Civil War and rising to commander-in-chief. He was the general Lincoln and the country had longed for. That he smoked, drank, and gambled to excess made things even better. In many people’s eyes, he was, indeed, “United States” Grant.
DEMOCRAT: HORATIO SEYMOUR “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.” This line from Julius Caesar might well be applied to Horatio Seymour, one of the most obscure presidential candidates ever. Seymour was in desperate need of a good PR man and made a number of blunders. Aside from becoming weepy when drafted as the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee, he also addressed a mob of draft rioters in New York in 1863 as “My friends,” an opening gambit that calmed the crowd but didn’t bring Horatio terribly good press.
THE CAMPAIGN
Republicans gleefully seized on Seymour’s tentative acceptance of the Democratic nomination by mocking “The Great Decliner” in what became a famous little ditty:
There’s a queer sort of chap they call Seymour,
A strange composition called Seymour,
Who stoutly declines,
Then happiness finds
In accepting, does Horatio Seymour.
Certain Republicans hinted that hereditary insanity ran in his family. And, of course, he was a Democrat—“Scratch a Democrat,” the line ran, “and you’ll find a rebel under his skin.”
Republicans also went after VP nominee Francis Blair—a war hero from a distinguished political family. A private investigator discovered that Blair had spent two days in a Hartford hotel, where his room came to only ten dollars, but he spent sixty-five bucks on whiskey and lemons!
The Democrats were not idle, of course, and Grant presented an inviting target. Despite his many pluses, Grant’s drinking became an issue. Even though many people, including reporters, had downplayed his bouts of blind drunkenness during the Civil War, stories abounded and his enemies called him a soak (slang for an alcoholic). One popular ditty went:
I am Captain Grant of the Black Marines,
The stupidest man that ever was seen.
I smoke my weed and drink my gin,
Paying with the people’s tin.
The “Black Marine” slur was about Grant’s supposed support for Negro suffrage, although Grant (and Seymour) tried to downplay this volatile issue.
THE WINNER: ULYSSES S. GRANT
It was closer than expected. Grant had refused to make speeches or really say much of anything (when cornered by a reporter at a train station in New Jersey and asked what he thought about his presidential prospects, he replied, “I don’t think of it at all right this time. My principal object just now is to catch the train”). Grant had taken a trip to Indian Territory so that he could be seen with former Civil War heroes Sherman and Sheridan, but even then he refused to make speeches.
Meanwhile, three weeks before the election, Seymour hit the speechmaking circuit, in part because many Democrats feared a humiliating defeat and wanted to replace him with another candidate. These efforts may have helped, but they didn’t help enough. Grant won 3,013,650 votes to Seymour’s 2,708,744. For the first time in history, half a million blacks had voted—and it’s safe to assume that the overwhelming majority went for Grant.
The Republicans finally saw self-serving benefit in the black vote; they pushed through the Fifteenth Amendment, ratified in 1870, which said that the right to vote should not be denied because of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” Not until the Voting Rights Act of 1965, however, would many blacks vote freely in Southern states.
GENERAL ORDER NO. 11 Grant was branded an anti-Semite, and the accusation has some basis in truth. His infamous “General Order No. 11” of 1862 began: “The Jews, as a class violating every regulation of trade established by the Treasury Department … are hereby expelled.” The order was quickly revoked by Lincoln, but it became campaign fodder anyway. One might add that since anti-Semitism was so widespread in Grant’s day, the people who were accusing him were probably guilty of it themselves.
THE NORTH’S DIRTY LITTLE SECRET In 1868, even though an entire war had just been fought over slavery, black votes were counted in only sixteen of the thirty-seven states. Eight of these states were in the former Confederacy. (Blacks were registered to vote in Mississippi, Texas, and Virginia, but the electoral votes in these states did not count because they had not yet been readmitted to the union.) Connecticut did not allow blacks to vote, and New York made ownership of $250 worth of property a requirement before allowing a black to cast his ballot.
Democrats described Ulysses S. Grant as a raging alcoholic, but voters didn’t
really care.
ULYSSES S. GRANT
VS. HORACE GREELEY
Most historians agree that Ulysses S. Grant was an honest guy. They also concur that he had a lot of dishonest acquaintances. Among them were Jay Gould and Jim Fisk, a pair of financiers determined to corner the gold market. Gould and Fisk managed to befriend Grant’s brother-in-law Abel Corbin and assistant secretary of the treasury Daniel Butterfield, who gave them access to the president. The resulting “Gold Ring” scandal reached into all corners of Grant’s administration, as did affairs of the Whiskey Ring and Indian Ring. (“Ring,” connoting a cabal of plotters, was the all-purpose scandal descriptive in the Grant years, much like “-gate” became the suffix of choice after the Nixon years and Watergate.)
Many Republicans—tired of the corruption and fed up with Grant’s failure to reform the civil service and have any serviceable Reconstruction policy—wanted somebody else in his job. These so-called Liberal Republicans broke from the main Republican herd and sought an uprising of “honest citizens” to sweep Grant from office. They were a little like the reforming Democrats of the 1960s; but instead of trying to empower the common man they felt the “intellectually well-endowed” should rule government.
Holding their own table-thumping convention in Cincinnati in May, they nominated famous newspaper editor Horace Greeley for president and Missouri Governor Benjamin Gratz Brown as vice president. The Democrats, meeting a month later, decided to throw in their lot with the Liberal Republicans; Greeley became their candidate as well.
Greeley is one of the oddest candidates for president in the history of the country. He was a powerful newspaperman, the editor of the New York Tribune, and a crusading journalist—he had famously advised young men to “Go West.” He was a balding, rotund vegetarian with tiny spectacles and big white sideburns—imagine a cross between a Dickens character, Truman Capote, and the musician David Crosby. And on top of all that, he was an atheist.
In the meantime, the regular Republicans, if you will, held their convention and renominated Grant. Knowing that smart positioning for his campaign would be Ordinary Guys Against Stuck-Up Snobs, Grant chose Henry Wilson of Massachusetts, a former shoemaker turned factory owner. Almost immediately, posters billing the two as “The Galena Tanner” (Grant’s father had been a tanner) and “The Natick Shoemaker” started rolling off the presses.
THE CAMPAIGN With a legendary war hero running against an atheist vegetarian newspaperman, you can probably imagine how things went. New York Republican boss Thurlow Weed wrote to a friend, “Six weeks ago I did not suppose that any considerable number of men, outside of a Lunatic Asylum, would nominate Greeley for President.” William Cullen Bryant echoed this sentiment, deciding that the only reason for Greeley’s nomination was that “bodies of men as individuals sometimes lose their wits.” For once, though, politicians weren’t accused of being sots. A reporter wrote sardonically that Greeley’s nomination had to be the result of “too much brains and not enough whiskey” at the Cincinnati convention.
THE WINNER: ULYSSES S. GRANT Grant won 3,598,235 votes to Greeley’s 2,834,761. All thirty-seven states voted; thirty-one went for Grant.
“I was the worst beaten man who ever ran for high office,” Greeley declared. And to make matters worse, his wife died just a week before Election Day. Soon after the election, Greeley began to suffer from hallucinations and was taken to a private sanitarium. “Utterly ruined beyond hope,” as he wrote, he waited for “the night [to close] its jaws on me forever.” He died November 29. Grant attended his funeral.
“Never in American history,” wrote historian Eugene Roseboom, “have two more unfit men been offered to the country for the highest office.… The man of no ideas was running against the man of too many.”
RUTHERFORD HAYES
VS.
SAMUEL TILDEN
“… it seemed as if the dead had been raised.”
—Zachariah Chandler, Republican National Chairman, 1876
America’s centennial year, 1876, was a time of glorious celebration across the country. From May through November, people flocked to Philadelphia’s Centennial Exposition, especially to the vast Machinery Hall, which held thirteen acres of the engineering wonders of the age, including electric lights and elevators, as well as the typewriter, telegraph, and telephone. The visiting Emperor Dom Pedro of Brazil held Alexander Graham Bell’s device to his ear and then immediately dropped it, exclaiming, “My God, it talks!”
The voice that shocked the good emperor signified American might and modernity—not to mention a century’s worth of the grand triumph of American ideals and democracy. It is, therefore, quite ironic that one of the dirtiest and most brutal elections in nineteenth-century American history was about to occur. It is a further irony that both candidates, Rutherford B. Hayes and Samuel J. Tilden, were so-called reform candidates whose stated goal was to wipe out corruption in government.
In 1876, Ulysses S. Grant hungered for a third term, but the stench of scandal and cronyism hung so heavily over his administration that Republicans finally said no mas. In their convention in Cincinnati in mid-June, they chose Rutherford B. Hayes, governor of Ohio, who would run on a platform holding elected officials to rigid standards of probity and responsibility. His running mate would be New York Congressman William Wheeler
The Democratic Party was desperate for a presidential victory—after all, they hadn’t won in sixteen years—and they were certain that they could take advantage of a Republican Party weakened by the series of corruption scandals that had rocked the Grant administration. They picked as their nominee Samuel J. Tilden, governor of New York. Tilden was the Rudy Giuliani of his age; as a crusading Manhattan D.A., he had smashed Boss Tweed’s powerful ring of corruption and sent the Boss himself to prison. His VP was the Indianan Thomas Hendricks.
THE CANDIDATES
REPUBLICAN: RUTHERFORD B. HAYES No one ever claimed that the fifty-three-year-old Hayes was the most fascinating guy in the world. But he was a former congressman and honest-to-goodness Civil War hero (four times wounded), the happily married father of seven, and just about as hardworking and sincere as a politician could be. Hayes would often write notes to himself, accusing himself of not being thrifty or “prudent” enough and of partaking in “too much light reading.” He prayed with his family every morning and sang gospel hymns with them in the evening—no heavy partying for this guy.
DEMOCRAT: SAMUEL J. TILDEN Tilden had a brilliant mind, but you wouldn’t want him kissing your baby. He was an icy, aloof bachelor whose penetrating intellect made even his friends uncomfortable, and he was prone to bouts of ill health. And when he wasn’t really sick, he imagined he was. An intense hypochondriac, he once visited his doctor every day for a month. One of his biggest political liabilities was that Tilden had taken no part in the Civil War—in fact, he had amassed millions from his railroad and iron mines during the conflict.
THE CAMPAIGN
Although the candidates were still not making public appearances, their political machines were percolating. Tilden began a public relations campaign to overcome his cold-fish image. Hiring editors, writers, and artists, he set up a “Newspaper Popularity Bureau,” whose sole purpose was to manufacture the image of a warm and loveable Samuel J. Tilden; they issued press releases to newspapers all over the country. As the election heated up, Tilden created a so-called Literary Bureau in which teams of writers churned out anti-Hayes material, including a 750-page book that attacked Hayes for supposedly being party to Grantian scandals—“wicked schemes for peculation”—and for stealing $400 dollars from a Union deserter about to be executed. (Strangely enough, Hayes actually did take the money before the man was shot, but he passed it on to the man’s family—a fact Hayes was unable to prove until after the election.)
But Tilden’s dirty tricks couldn’t hold a candle to those of Zachariah Chandler, the bewhiskered, bejeweled, and often besotted Republican National Chairman who was also Hayes’s campaign mana
ger. He kicked off the campaign with a fund-raising letter sent to every Republican appointee holding office: “We look to you as one of the Federal beneficiaries to help bear the burden. Two percent of your salary is __. Please remit promptly. At the close of the campaign, we shall place a list of those who have not paid in the hands of the head of the department you are now in.”
Unfortunately, none of this bad behavior comes anywhere close to the dirty tricks perpetrated by both parties in the South. The Republicans—the party of the Great Emancipator, Abraham Lincoln—wanted freed blacks to vote and thus prodded many of them to the ballot boxes at gunpoint. Democrats in South Carolina and elsewhere started violent race riots, in some cases shooting and killing blacks who attempted to exercise their franchise. On both sides, men voted ten or twenty times, and local party bosses stood by ballot boxes, tearing up any votes for the “wrong” candidate.
THE WINNER: SAMUEL J. TILDEN?!?
By the time the polls closed on Election Day, Samuel J. Tilden was ahead 250,000 in the popular vote (out of a total of 8,320,000 votes cast) and had 184 electoral votes to Hayes’s 165. (Nearly 82 percent of eligible Americans voted, the most in the nation’s history.) One more electoral vote would put Tilden over the top, and since there were twenty more out there (divided among Florida, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Oregon), he seemed assured of victory.
In New York City, Hayes went to bed certain he had lost; his party chairman, Zachariah Chandler, went out and got drunk.
But then came one of those curious moments upon which history pivots. Prominent Republican General Daniel E. Sickles, on his way home from the theater, stopped into the deserted Republican National Headquarters to check the election returns. Sickles was a notorious figure at the time and remains so today—hero to some, villain to others. (In 1859, he killed Philip Barton Key, son of Francis Scott Key, and then was acquitted of murder using the first-ever-in-American-history “not guilty by reason of temporary insanity” plea. Sickles rose to the rank of general in the Civil War, lost a leg at Gettysburg, and was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor—but many felt that his actions on the field nearly cost the Union the battle.)
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