1876

by Gore Vidal

  “Will the Governor pay?”

  “No. At the moment the Governor is sending every honest and distinguished man he can think of to the South to counteract the Republicans, who’ve already sent half their leadership down there, including your friend Garfield, who is in Louisiana right now, wooing a Mr. J.M. Wells, the head of the Returning Board for Louisiana.”

  “Is Mr. Wells expensive?”

  Bigelow shuddered: not just a figurative shudder but an entire true convulsion of the body. “I am told Mr. Wells will give us Louisiana for one million dollars. Cash.”

  “The Governor…?”

  “…does not wish to pay for what he has already won.”

  “And Florida?”

  “W.E. Chandler arrived there on the ninth. To date he has been sent seven thousand dollars in cash from New York. Meanwhile, just in case, the Republican governor of Florida has asked General Grant for troops. We’ve sent some good men there, too…”

  “Armed with cash?”

  Bigelow looked ill. “I pray not. But Hewitt has told me that the price for Florida is two hundred thousand dollars. To be paid directly to the Board of State Canvassers.”

  “That seems to me to be modest.”

  “That seems to me to be of a horror beyond belief!”

  “John, you have spent most of your life in this city. Why are you surprised that the politicians elsewhere come as high?”

  “I have always thought of our native city as unique, due to the Catholic influx.” Bigelow’s hobby-horse briefly pranced. “Still I cannot see how the Republicans can steal Louisiana or Florida.”

  “If they pay the money that Tilden refuses to pay, they will have both states, regardless of the popular vote.” This struck me as bleakly reasonable.

  “Well, Pelton has gone underground.” Bigelow was cryptic and sad.

  I was heartened; and hope that while Tilden continues to speak of legitimacy and honesty in government, his brother-in-law will be busy buying the votes already won.

  At the moment, Bigelow is assisting Tilden in the writing of a definitive study of The Presidential Counts since the time of George Washington. They believe that this scholarly work will absolutely prove to the Congress that Tilden has won the election.

  If Governor Tilden has a fatal flaw, it is his curious notion that men can be compelled by good argument to be honest, to show disinterest where there is only interest and greed.

  2

  DECEMBER 13: Congress is now in session. The Senate has a Republican majority of 17. The House of Representatives has a Democratic majority of 74.

  After a month of confusion, of money given and of money taken, of Federal troops on the alert, and of fierce Southern whites arming themselves to those famous proverbial teeth, there is still no resolution.

  On December 6, the electors in the various states of the Union met. There were no surprises. As we have known all along, the Republican masters of Louisiana, Florida, and South Carolina have obliged their states to send two sets of returns to Congress; as has Oregon. One set favours Tilden, and reflects the actual vote; the other favours Hayes, and reflects fraud. Tilden still has 184 undisputed votes; Hayes, 165 (he has lost one vote); in dispute, 20.

  This morning Hewitt declared Tilden to be the president. Although many Democrats want the Governor to take the oath of office immediately, there has been no response at all from Gramercy Park. Tilden is busy preparing his legal case. Pelton is underground, spending money, I pray. Out in Ohio, Hayes is now silent while at Washington City President Grant is more than ever mysterious. On instructions from Tilden, Hewitt went to see the President last week. Like all of us, Tilden is alarmed at the way people speak so casually and so openly of coups d’état.

  Hewitt found General Grant surprisingly straightforward. In Grant’s view, Hayes has carried South Carolina (which may be true) and Florida (which is not true), but he agrees that Hayes has plainly lost Louisiana to Tilden.

  The President then went on to observe that since Louisiana is such a peculiarly corrupt state and that since both sides have made complaints of irregularities, all sets of returns from Louisiana should be thrown out and the election decided in the House of Representatives, as prescribed by the Constitution. Since the House is Democratic, Grant tacitly accepts the fact that Tilden is his successor. We are much encouraged.

  Yet in every corner of the land storm warnings sound. “Tilden or Blood!” is a cry more and more heard not only at the South but here in the city.

  Although my last piece for the Herald examined our electoral process in order to make the case that “due process of law” is all that keeps us from becoming another Mexico, I am by no means certain that this terrible business is going to have a peaceful resolution.

  Item: this morning Company D, 35th Battalion, of the New York National Guard declared themselves ready to march on Washington. And the South is arming.

  “Tilden or Blood!”

  I think of Paris—of the Communards—of the slaughter.

  3

  THIS EVENING at Chickering Hall I addressed a large audience of Europeans come to observe the election. Apparently I was the choice of both Democrats and Republicans to address those foreign personalities (to a man, lovers of liberty) who have converged on New York to observe the way our republic manages elections in its hundredth year.

  Since the opening of the Centennial Exhibition, the foreign press have been writing paeans to the United States. Now—for more than a month—they have been astonished witnesses to the complete breakdown of our electoral system. There were elements of high comedy, I fear, in my glum performance.

  I was introduced by August Belmont, whose Eighteenth Street mansion is just across Fifth Avenue from the Hall. Although, like me, Belmont is a Tilden supporter, it was agreed that tonight neither of us would be partisan as we did our best to explain the constitutional crisis to our country’s well-wishers.

  Belmont was brief, gracious; he spoke in both French and German. I spoke only in French.

  As I crossed the stage, the calcium or limelights full upon me, my heart’s pounding was far louder in my ears than the polite applause that greeted me.

  I had a written French text. Unfortunately, the lights had been so cunningly arranged that I was quite dazzled and could not read. So I improvised, not too badly, using my very special, very resonant sententious manner, reminiscent of Flaubert’s idiot and thus entirely suitable for this peculiar occasion.

  When I came to the matter of corruption, I was delicate. The audience, however, knew perfectly well what I was talking about.

  “It is mysterious,” I said, “how many flaws can be found in the actual process of voting. It should be a simple matter for a voter to mark his ballot Democratic or Republican. But ever since the election last November, the good people of Florida—or at least their Republican guardians—have discovered that Tilden did not win that languorous, tropical state by ninety-two votes, but lost it to Hayes by nine hundred and ninety-two. Since these margins are small, it is possible that the first count was incorrect. But now we are told that Louisiana—also languorous, tropical—after giving Tilden a majority of six thousand five hundred and forty-nine votes in November, has now, on second thought, elected Hayes with a majority of four thousand eight hundred and seven votes…”

  By this time there was some laughter and a good deal of murmuring in the audience. Squinting hard, I was just able to see Emma, sitting with Mrs. Belmont in the central box.

  “These curious last-minute changes in the voting of the two states caused the Electoral College on December sixth to elect Hayes—by one vote—president. But since Hayes has clearly lost the election by more than a quarter-million votes to Tilden, the Congress must now decide which of the two sets of disputed returns from the contested four states are valid: the first set that elected Tilden in November or the second set
that elected Hayes in December.”

  Just below me, in the first row, an angry Frenchman was now on his feet. He is one of a group of workmen sent to observe the ways of Democracy, their passage paid for by a popular subscription. As the party of workmen left France they were blessed by none other than Victor Hugo himself, whose prose style is even more emptily splendid than the one I resort to in French.

  Hugo had roared, “The future is already dawning, and it clearly belongs to Democracy, which is purely pacific.” Apparently the great man has not yet been told of America’s attack on Mexico in the forties or on Canada in 1812. Hugo spoke confidently of the coming United States of Europe and bade the good workmen to go forth, bearing a torch (how rhetoricians love that torch!), “the torch of civilization from the land where Christ was born to the land which beheld the birth of John Brown.” It would seem that the master’s genius stops short of elementary geography.

  “Explain to me, sir,” said the workman, “in what way this election differs from that infamous election where Louis Napoleon destroyed the French republic, and made himself emperor.”

  Much cheering and applause. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Belmont nodding his head in a most demagogic way at the audience.

  “The difference,” I said, when the audience had again grown quiet, “is that General Grant will leave office in March—”

  “But Grant’s party…”

  “But Grant’s heir…”

  “But Hayes…”

  From various parts of the Hall the discouraged—no, the enraged—lovers of democracy started to shout their slogans and their maledictions.

  In a last desperate effort to maintain control, I shouted back: “In February the Congress will declare that Samuel Tilden—already elected president by a majority of a quarter million votes—is indeed our president. And the American republic will continue, and will flourish!” I managed to create a sufficient ovation at that point to get myself offstage. I was soaked with sweat, and shaking as if from fever.

  Emma and I went back with the Belmonts to their house—no, palace—where supper had been prepared for half a hundred people, of whom a number had been at Chickering Hall. I was complimented on my performance. But I was not allowed to bask for very long in much-needed praise. Before I could do more than drink a glass of champagne, Belmont had led me into his library, where beneath acres of fine morocco bindings, he delivered himself of an impassioned speech, his guttural accent every bit as reminiscent of Bismarck’s as was his startling theme. “That workman was correct. What’s happening now is like what Louis Napoleon did when he made himself Napoleon III. But I want Tilden to play the part of Louis Napoleon. I want him to take the crown. Because it’s his, by every right. So let him seize it. And let him use force if necessary!”

  “But he has no force. They have the troops.” I settled back in a leather-covered chair of the new deep sort. My clothes were clinging to me most disagreeably as the sweat began to dry. All I need now is to contract pneumonia.

  “They are worse than Jacobins!” Belmont inveighed against the Republican leadership, shifting the historic analogy to yet an earlier epoch.

  “Everything,” I said soothingly, “will be resolved by some sort of electoral commission.”

  “But we don’t know what the commission will be. Or who will be on it. But we do know that every day that passes, our position weakens. For a month the country has thought of Tilden as the next president. But now they begin to doubt. They read the Times…”

  “And the Herald,” I added softly; ours is the larger circulation.

  “I want Tilden in Washington. Now!”

  “Taking the oath of office?”

  “No. He’ll do that in March, as the Constitution prescribes. But I want him directing our party in the Congress. He can’t leave anything so important to Hewitt, who’s a good man but…well, Tilden is a master of politics. He also has legitimacy. And the combination…” And so on.

  Finally, I was released; and had my supper. Just as I was leaving the Belmont house, I was stopped by a plainly dressed middle-aged woman who had been waiting for me in the street. “I am a cousin of your late wife, Mr. Schuyler.” And so she was (her grandmother was a Traxler; she, too, is called Emma). She lives in Wisconsin where she has supported herself and five children by writing for the foreign press ever since her Austrian husband left home one day. I promised to give her an interview.

  “My oldest daughter is very like yours,” she said wistfully. Emma was kind to her unfortunate cousin and namesake.

  Emma dropped me off at the Fifth Avenue Hotel on her way to the Sanford house, where she dwells in lonely state. Denise is in South Carolina. Sanford is in Washington, meddling in the electoral process. Most genially he invited me to stay in the house during his absence but I said that I prefer living at my hotel with its private telegraph office and its milling throngs of Republican politicians. I am able to learn more during a half-hour in the Amen Corner than I can from a reading of all the newspapers.

  “You were superb, Papa!” Emma was comforting.

  “I was adequate, which is superb given that audience and all that I could not say.”

  “You must spend Christmas with us, in the South. Denise insists. So do I.”

  “I know she does.” Denise writes me nearly every day to report that her spirits and health are both good.

  “I must stay here with the Governor.”

  “But all this could take a very long time.”

  “Not too long. By March fourth, there must be a new president. That is the law.”

  “So that means there will be two months of—disturbance, doesn’t it?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “Will there be revolution?” The question on Emma’s lips was very real. We have lived through so many desperate bloody times at Paris.

  “No one knows,” was my wise response. “It depends on the Governor. At the moment there are supposed to be more than a hundred thousand men at the South, ready to fight.”

  “Now I know why one visits but does not actually live in Africa.”

  Emma goes South tomorrow. I assume she will be safe enough on the Sanford plantation, where Denise plans to stay until her child is born in February.

  In a letter waiting for me when I got back to my room just now, Denise writes, “Emma thinks it safer here. Certainly it’s comfortable. And she has sent me Madame Restell’s most comforting and certainly most expensive ‘assistant’…is that the word? to see me through the accouchement. But you’ll be here long before then. By New Year’s Day at the latest, or I shall be furious and deprive you of your godfatherdom!”

  Twelve

  1

  I WRITE THIS on the cars from Albany to New York. The parlour car is nearly empty. In the seat next to me is Governor Tilden, as of this morning governor no longer. At the moment Tilden is sleeping in an upright position, the expression on his face politely expectant. Bigelow is across the aisle from us. Nearby, the detective is reading a novel with a yellow cover. Our several fellow travellers stare with some interest at the president-elect. It is New Year’s Day, 1877.

  I must say that I have never been so tired in my life. In fact, all three of us are beginning to succumb to the never-ceasing strain.

  Our day began when the outgoing governor of New York, Samuel Tilden, escorted his successor, one Lucius Robinson, into the Assembly chamber of the state capitol to take the oath of office.

  Bigelow and I sat in the back of the chamber, and I fear that Bigelow slept through most of Tilden’s graceful speech. But then Bigelow had helped write it.

  I was on hand in my capacity as official Tilden-watcher for the Herald. The national press was represented hardly at all.

  Bigelow remarked that the number of journalists in attendance was about average for the inaugural of a New York governor. This is
ominous, considering that today Tilden gave his first major address since being elected president.

  With altogether too much delicacy Tilden referred to the current “subject of controversy,” making the point that in the twenty-two previous presidential elections, the Congress had simply recorded the votes sent them by the Electoral College. But now the Congress must choose between two absolutely conflicting sets of votes sent them by four states.

  Tilden reminded the audience that three years ago the Congress had declared illegal the present government of Louisiana, whose Returning Board has just seen fit to reverse the state’s popular vote. Tilden also spelled out the illegality of the South Carolina and Florida boards. But where he ought to have thundered his contempt for the most corrupt and now tyrannous Administration in our history and unfurled his banner as our rightful lord, he was throughout his address very much the dry constitutional lawyer and in no way the outraged tribune of a cheated people.

  Tilden made no reference to the two congressional committees (one from the Senate, the other from the House) whose task it is to create a solution. The House Committee on Privileges has already declared that the election must be resolved within the Congress. Tilden concurs on the ground that the Constitution requires disputed presidential elections to be decided in the House of Representatives, as was done in 1800, when Colonel Burr and Thomas Jefferson each received the same number of votes for the presidency. The House chose between them, and in my prejudiced view chose unwisely.

  Another solution is to form some sort of special agency outside the Congress, and let it decide. Tilden thinks such an agency would be contrary to both Constitution and custom. Well, we shall know soon enough, for there will be a joint session of the two committees on January 12. Jamie insists I go to Washington.

  After the inaugural of the new governor, Bigelow and I accompanied Tilden to the house in Eagle Street where some trunks were assembled, as well as half a dozen well-wishers (not including the new governor), and a representative of the New York Central Railroad.