Whatever historians might think of him, Sickles was a man of action. Deciding that Hayes could win if he somehow regained control of Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina, Sickles, pretending to be Zachariah Chandler, wired leading Republicans in these states, saying: “With your state sure for Hayes, he is elected. Hold your state.”
By the time Chandler was roused from a whiskey-induced stupor, the race to win was on. The struggle over the twenty remaining electoral votes lasted from November 8, 1876, to March 2, 1877. Republican-controlled “returning boards” (groups in each state who tallied electoral votes) simply threw out enough Democratic votes to swing Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina to Hayes. Democrats cried foul, officials of both parties flocked to the South, and President Grant sent federal troops, just in case. In the end, an Election Commission was established, consisting of five U.S. senators, five congressmen, and five Supreme Court justices, all of whom split evenly along party lines. With the commission tied at 7–7, the Supreme Court justice who had the deciding vote resigned—and a Republican justice took his place. Hayes was voted into office with 185 electoral votes to Tilden’s 184.
WHO REALLY WON? Had it been a totally fair election, would Tilden have won? Probably. Most historians believe that, at the very least, he carried Louisiana and Florida. In the end, fittingly enough, this dirtiest of all nineteenth-century elections finished with a secret dirty deal. Southern Democrats promised not to contest the Election Commission’s results if Hayes, once in office, would pull federal troops out of the South and appoint at least one Southerner to his cabinet. Reconstruction collapsed—and the future of civil rights was set back for decades—but Hayes was awarded the presidency.
March 5, 1877, was Rutherford Hayes’s Inauguration Day, but things had become so heated—someone had already fired a shot through the window of Hayes’s home—that he had to be secretly sworn in.
TAKING AIM AT MOTHER Desperate to discredit Hayes, the Democrats spread the rumor that he once shot and wounded his own mother “in a fit of insanity.” Anonymous letters written to newspapers claimed that Hayes, in Ohio before the war, returned home from a night of drinking, pulled a gun, and shot Sophia Birchard Hayes in the arm.
Since Sophia Hayes died in 1866, she wasn’t around to deny the reports, but there is no record of any gunshot wound to Hayes’s mother. And we certainly know that Hayes and his wife, Lucy, were not what you’d call heavy drinkers; once in the White House, they banned all alcoholic beverages and served only water at state dinners. International visitors were horrified.
TILDEN’S WOMEN? Since Samuel Tilden was a bachelor—and a New York City bachelor, at that—Republicans went to town claiming that he had had numerous affairs with women, some married. But the nastiest smear was contained in pamphlets published in the early fall of 1876; they claimed that Tilden had contracted syphilis some years earlier from an Irish whore on the Bowery, and that this venereal disease not only affected his actions, but made him susceptible to blackmail.
Tilden died of pneumonia in 1886, at age seventy-two. There is no medical record of his having any STD.
MOST VICIOUSLY HYPERBOLIC POLITICAL SPEECH Stumping for the Republican Hayes, writer Robert G. Ingersoll attacked the Democrats by claiming they were all Confederates at heart: “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.”
According to certain Democrats, Rutherford B. Hayes shot his own mother in a fit of rage.
JAMES GARFIELD
VS.
WINFIELD HANCOCK
“[In 1880] the Republican Party existed [only] to oppose the Democratic Party.”
—John D. Hicks, author of The American Nation
Under Rutherford Hayes, America entered the very heart of what Mark Twain dubbed the Gilded Age. A huge economic expansion was led by a few robber barons—er, industrialists—like Andrew Carnegie, John Rockefeller, John Jacob Astor, Jay Gould, and Cyrus W. Field. The rich got richer, the poor got poorer, and the disenfranchised were more disenfranchised.
Although contemporary historian Henry Adams called him “a third-rate nonentity,” Hayes had not been a bad president. He was relatively honest and had attempted (albeit with little success) to reform the highly corrupt, patronage-ridden civil service. But he was hamstrung by the promises he’d made to Democrats to win in 1876. Hayes’s fellow Republicans saw their president withdrawing troops from the South (troops that supported corrupt Republican carpetbag state governments), giving important positions to Southern Democrats, and approving money for Southern pork barrels. And they didn’t like it.
Hayes wisely decided not to run for a second term—setting the stage for an internal Republican Party battle that has seldom been equaled in American political history. The party was divided into two wings. One was called the Stalwarts, made up of those loyal to the old-line party of General Ulysses S. Grant, who was fishing for a third term as president. The other was dubbed the Half-Breeds—moderates who wanted reform within the party and abhorred the thought of another four years of “Grantism,” that is, the general’s corrupt cronies dipping into the public trough at will.
As the Republican Convention met in Chicago’s brand-new glass and iron Exposition Building on June 2, 1880, Roscoe Conkling, the powerful and vain U.S. senator from New York, thought he had votes locked up for Grant. The famous general had been out of the country on a two-and-a-half-year world tour, long enough for people to forget the scandals of his administration and look upon Grant with nostalgic fondness. The Half-Breeds were led by Maine Senator James G. Blaine, Conkling’s sworn enemy (who had once called Conkling “a majestic, supereminent, overpowering, turkey-gobbler strut”).
At stake was the fate of the party as well as that of the nation since most assumed the Republicans would win the White House, as they had since 1860 (one reason the editorial cartoonist Thomas Nast had just caricaturized the Republican Party as a stolid, dependable elephant—an image that stuck). Thousands crammed the convention halls as ballot after ballot was cast. Spontaneous demonstrations arose during the alphabetized roll calls, either for Grant or for Blaine himself for president. One woman spectator even climbed a “Goddess of Liberty Statue” on the convention stage and began ripping off her clothes.
After all was said and done, Conkling put Grant in nomination with a fiery speech culminating in a sappy poem:
Do you ask what State he hails from?
Our sole reply shall be:
He hails from Appomattox
And its famous apple tree.
But a new senator from Ohio, James A. Garfield, arose and nominated fellow Ohioan Treasury Secretary John Sherman, brother of William Tecumseh Sherman. John Sherman was a favorite of the Half-Breeds, although not of the public at large, for reasons that are evident in his nickname: the Ohio Icicle. But as ballots were taken, an extraordinary thing began to happen: More and more delegates voted for Garfield, swayed by the idea of him as a moderating force between the two sharply divided factions. After thirty-six ballots—the most ever cast at a Republican convention, before or since—the forty-eight-year-old Garfield became the dark horse Republican candidate for president. Chester Arthur, Stalwart machine politician from New York, was chosen as the vice-presidential candidate.
After this uproar, the Democratic convention seemed like a minor afterthought: On only the second ballot, they nominated General Winfield Scott Hancock, former Civil War hero and military governor. His runningmate was William H. English, a banker from Indiana, a state both parties desperately needed because of its large number of electoral votes.
THE CANDIDATES
REPUBLICAN: JAMES A. GARFIELD The low-key and likeable Garfield was the last American presidential candidate to be born in a log cabin. During the summer of his seventeenth year, he drove mules on the towpaths of the Ohio Canal (hence his nicknames “Towpath Jim” and “Canal Boy”). He rose
to become president of Hiram College, then volunteered for the Civil War. He distinguished himself in numerous battles and became a major general, then was elected to Congress in the post—Civil War years.
DEMOCRAT: WINFIELD SCOTT HANCOCK Since nothing came between General Hancock and his feedbag, he was described sarcastically by Republicans as “a good man weighing two hundred and forty pounds.” But in truth he was a good man, with such a strong military record during the Civil War that he had been known as “Hancock the Superb.” However, he had never held public office or even dabbled in politics, and Republican machine politicians were ready to make mincemeat out of him.
THE CAMPAIGN
As America surged toward the twentieth century, the country faced pressing issues: the need for child labor laws and an eight-hour workday, the plight of blacks, the rights of women, and a graduated federal income tax, just to name a few. Democrat and Republican platforms did not address any of these concerns. Instead, they emphasized civil service reform, opposed aid to parochial schools, and called for curtailing Chinese immigration—“an evil of great magnitude,” claimed the Republicans. (With nothing to lose, the Republicans also came out firmly against polygamy—the “gay marriage” red herring of its day.)
Like punch-drunk fighters who don’t know the bell has rung, the two major parties were still fighting the Civil War, a decade-and-a-half after it ended, running two heroic generals against each other. Trying to smear Garfield with Grantian scandals, the Democrats claimed that he had taken $329 in bribes from a holding company for the Union Pacific Railroad during the Credit Mobilier scandal. After Garfield provided an innocent explanation, Democrats switched tactics and assailed him for having an unpaid tailor’s bill in Troy, New York.
Ulysses S. Grant, stumping for Garfield, apparently forgot that he had called Hancock a “glorious soldier” during the Civil War and told a journalist that Hancock was “crazy to be president. He is ambitious, vain, and weak.” Nominating Hancock, a Republican newspaper wrote, “no more changes the character [of the Democrats] than a figurehead of the Virgin on Kidd’s pirate ship.”
THE WINNER: JAMES GARFIELD
In a surprisingly close election in which 78.4 percent of eligible voters went to the polls, James Garfield won 4,446,158 votes to Hancock’s 4,444,260. But Garfield’s Electoral College margin was 214 to 155. The modest and capable Half-Breed from Ohio was going to Washington—although within a few short months of his inaugural address, he would become the second American president to be assassinated.
SOAPY SAM “Soap” and “Soapy Sam” were 1880s slang for cash passed out to voters to encourage them to vote for a candidate. Soaping palms had been the custom in American elections for years, but money exchanged hands in an unprecedented fashion during the Garfield-Hancock contest.
Indiana was one of the states that had still not coordinated its local and congressional elections with the national Election Day in early November. Instead, Indiana held its elections on October 12; consequently, many looked to that state as a bellwether of the country-wide election. Since Democratic vice-presidential candidate William English was a Hoosier, Republicans were terrified that the state would go for Hancock, so they quickly sprang into action.
One Republican operative reported that, in his opinion, there were “30,000 merchantable votes in the State.” James Garfield and Chester Arthur urgently requested cash from their Wall Street connections, and a silver-tongued bagman named Stephen Dorsey was sent to Indiana carrying, by some accounts, as much as $400,000 in two-dollar bills. Soapy Sam had come to the rescue.
To be fair, the Democrats also attempted to buy votes, but since they lacked Republican access to Wall Street dough, they were mostly unsuccessful. Their biggest dirty trick consisted of sending in “repeaters” or “floaters” from outside Indiana to vote repeatedly in different precincts. In the end, Soapy Sam helped carry the state for Republicans and Garfield.
SURPRISE! On October 20, 1880, James Garfield fell victim to what is probably the first October Surprise in U.S. presidential election history. A newspaper improbably named the New York Truth printed a letter purportedly written by Garfield to an H. L. Morey of the Employers Union of Lynn, Massachusetts. In it Garfield wrote that the “Chinese problem” (the fears of whites in the West that Chinese immigrants would take jobs from them) was not a problem at all, and that employers had the right “to buy labor where they can get it the cheapest.”
This struck terror into those who had been trying to keep the Chinese out of America, particularly Californians. Garfield certainly did not write the Morey letter and was able to refute it. Investigation showed that there was no Morey and no Employers Union in Lynn, Massachusetts, either. The letter was traced to the hand of one Kenward Philp, a Truth journalist who was later arrested and indicted for fraud.
Despite the fact that Garfield was able to prove his innocence, the Morey letter hurt him. It caused him to lose California, which almost caused him to lose the close election of 1880.
THE THREE-PERCENT SOLUTION Chester “Chet” Arthur, the Stalwart from New York, may have been picked as vice president to placate party boss Roscoe Conkling, but he sure knew his job. New York was home to thousands of state and federal civil-service workers, all of whom held their jobs at the sufferance of the big bosses. The going rate to keep their livelihood? In 1876, the Republicans had set the mandatory campaign contribution at 2 percent of annual salary, but Arthur upped it to 3 percent, delivering hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Republican treasure chest.
James Garfield and Chester Arthur bribed voters in Indiana with as much as $400,000 in two-dollar bills.
GROVER CLEVELAND
VS.
JAMES G. BLAINE
“Kind regards to Mrs. Fisher.
Burn this letter.”
—James G. Blaine, Republican candidate for president
Under the category of famous last words comes this utterance by James Garfield just before his inauguration: “Assassination can no more be guarded against than death by lightning, and it is not best to worry about either.”
During his first four months in office, Towpath Jim had done quite well, making inroads in his battle to dismantle the patronage system that had a stranglehold on the country’s civil service. But on July 2, 1881, he was shot and seriously wounded by Charles Guiteau, a deranged man who is usually described by historians as a “disappointed office seeker.” (Guiteau had haunted Garfield for months, desperate to earn a position as consul to Paris, even though he was supremely unqualified.)
Guiteau was also a Stalwart. His goal in the assassination was to bring Vice President Chester Arthur the presidency. “I am a Stalwart,” he proclaimed after his arrest, “and Arthur shall be President!” When Garfield died on September 19 (helped along to eternity by the unwashed and constantly probing fingers of his doctors), Guiteau’s vision was realized: “Chet” Arthur was sworn in as the twenty-first president of the United States.
As president, the dapper and corpulent Arthur was well-liked but not terribly energetic—his emerging Republican rival for the 1884 presidential nomination, James G. Blaine, called him a stalled ox. So his party failed to nominate him for a second term, which left the field wide open for a deliciously scandal-ridden presidential race. It can be likened in some ways to Bill Clinton’s 1992 race against George H. W. Bush, when the whole Gennifer Flowers affair reared its pretty blonde head.
THE CANDIDATES
DEMOCRAT: GROVER CLEVELAND Grover Cleveland was the picture of a Gilded Age politician—he had the well-fed look, the striped pants, the balding pate, the whole nine yards—with one critical exception: He was honest—so honest that he was known in the telling slang of the day as “ugly honest.” A former reform mayor of Buffalo and governor of New York State, Cleveland was picked on the second round of balloting at the Democratic convention. For VP, Cleveland chose Hoosier Thomas Hendricks, Samuel Tilden’s 1876 running mate, who could assure the pivotal votes of the state of Ind
iana.
REPUBLICAN: JAMES G. BLAINE At last it was James G. Blaine’s turn. This eloquent Maine-born former Speaker of the House, senator, and secretary of state under Garfield inspired deliriums of passion in his rabid supporters (known as Blainiacs). They had dubbed him the “Plumed Knight” for his courage and integrity, but many in the know thought that the good Maine man was on the take. It was, perhaps, a bad sign that the man he picked for his vice president, Illinois Senator John Logan, was suspected of corruption and known far and wide as “Black Jack.”
THE CAMPAIGN
Talk about wishful thinking: The chaplain giving the opening invocation for the Republican convention in June of 1884 prayed that “the coming political campaign be conducted with the decency, intelligence, patriotism and dignity of temper which becomes a free and intelligent people.”
Politicians nodded reverentially and then immediately went at it tooth and nail. A large portion of the Republican Party bolted to the Democrats immediately after Blaine’s nomination, including such leading luminaries as Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, Charles Francis Adams, and Mark Twain. These men, sarcastically called Mugwumps (an Algonquin Indian word meaning “big chief”) by their enemies, reviled Blaine for corruption and for being under the thumb of Republican party bosses. He had, as one editorialist put it, “wallowed in spoils like a rhinoceros in an African pool.”
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