Centennial Crisis- the Disputed Election of 1876
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POOL SELLING AT WASHINGTON
Washington, Nov. 6, 1876.
Pool selling here to-night amounted to very little, notwithstanding an order from New York to a prominent betting man to place $2,000 in lots on Tilden at odds of not greater than 5-to-4. One pool of 100-to-75 on Tilden and half dozen more at an average of 25-to-20 comprised the night’s business, the odds being in favor of Tilden, whose friends were much encouraged by the rainstorm tonight and a hope of its continuance tomorrow.
It is said tonight that the Republican plan of campaign underwent an important change within the past week, and that while Zach Chandler was apparently working might and main in New York to carry that State, the forces and money of the Republican National Committee were secretly sent to Indiana, the carrying of which state by the party insures the election to Hayes no matter how New York may go.
The Chicago Tribune for that day had numerous stories of political activity in different states. The paper was unabashedly Republican and pro-Hayes, as can be seen from its lead column heads:
TO-DAY. ——— IT WILL DECIDE ONE OF
THE GRAVEST ISSUES OF
THE AGE
———
WHILE NO MAN CAN TELL
WHAT THE DAY WILL BRING
FORTH,
———
THERE ARE MANY WISE MEN
WHO PREDICT A REPUBLICAN
VICTORY.
———
AND THEY FURNISH GOOD
REASONS FOR THE FAITH
THAT IS IN THEM.
———
REPUBLICAN CONFIDENCE
WAS NEVER MORE
UNWAVERING THAN NOW.
———
NEW YORK ADVICES VERY
FLATTERING FOR HAYES AND
WHEELER.
———
THE SAME IS TRUE OF
CONNECTICUT, NEW JERSEY,
AND INDIANA.
———
FOUR SOUTHERN STATES SET
DOWN AS SURE TO CHOOSE
HAYES ELECTORS.
———
PROVIDED THE CONFEDERATE
TILDENITES PERMIT A FAIR
AND HONEST ELECTION.
———
THE PROSPECT FAVORABLE
FOR A BIG VOTE IN
CHICAGO.
———
The Tribune not only slanted its headlines, but expressly predicted a Hayes victory. The Republican candidate had a good chance of carrying New York, the paper said, if the Democratic majority in New York City could be held below 40,000. Such a victory, along with the success in states more likely to be Republican, would give Hayes 195 electoral votes, 10 more than needed for a majority. In addition, the Tribune opined that nine other “doubtful” states were likely to go Republican: South Carolina, North Carolina, Nevada, New Jersey, Indiana, Louisiana, Connecticut, Oregon, and Florida. In fact, New York, New Jersey, North Carolina, Indiana, and Connecticut would all go Democratic.
The Tribune published other stories from across the nation evincing great interest in the election. Kentucky reported that the excitement was intense in every part of the state. So did Tennessee, which expressed justifiable confidence that Tilden would carry the state. Pennsylvania and Massachusetts likewise reported great interest in the election, which each predicted would go to Hayes. The Hayes majority in Pennsylvania was estimated to be between 10,000 and 20,000, while his majority in Massachusetts was expected to be on the order of 30,000. California reported an unprecedented increase in voter registration, with the city of San Francisco alone likely to cast 40,000 votes.
None of these accounts claimed to be in any way based on a public opinion poll. Reports of private wagers, and quite unscientific polls taken spontaneously within a small group, were all that was available to prognosticators. The New York Herald carried a story from a source who had polled his fellow passengers on the New York–Philadelphia Express train, and found a majority for Hayes.
These accounts and stories show the great interest in the presidential election of 1876, and the varied predictions of its outcome. People were prepared for a close vote, but scarcely anyone guessed just how close it would be.
— CHAPTER 5 —
ELECTION DAY IN NEW YORK CITY proved to be rainy, as predicted. Tilden voted in the morning and then spent several hours at Democratic headquarters at Everett House. Wellwishers and party officials confidently predicted his election, and he was in good spirits when he was driven home late in the afternoon. A telegraph line had been run to his elegant residence in Gramercy Park, where he continued to receive visitors. After dinner, he returned to headquarters to study the bulletins containing the election returns.
The Hayes family members gathered at their house in Columbus in a much less optimistic frame of mind. Hearing a report that Tilden would carry New York handily and that the vote in Ohio would be very close, they reconciled themselves to defeat.
At the national headquarters of the two parties in New York, returns began coming in as soon as the polls closed in the states along the eastern seaboard. Returns in that era were reported only by telegraph.
The returns dribbled in sporadically, rather than in clumps as they do now with four standard time zones in the continental United States. Time zones would be established by the railroads in 1883 and enacted into law in 1918. But in 1876, each sizable city was on its own “sun time.” When the sun was exactly overhead in that city, it was 12 noon, regardless of what time it might be in a city fifty miles east or fifty miles west. New York City was twelve minutes ahead of Boston and was slightly more than a minute behind Albany. These differences were little noted so long as travel was by stagecoach or wagon, but with the coming of the passenger trains and their fixed schedules, much confusion resulted. Thus the initiative for standard time zones came from the railroads.
All of the New England states except Connecticut—Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island— were carried by Hayes, but by considerably smaller margins than Grant’s in 1872. Connecticut, which had gone narrowly for Grant in 1872, now went even more narrowly for Tilden. Though he won only one of these six states, the returns from this Republican stronghold were auspicious for the New Yorker.
Tilden carried his home state by a margin of some 30,000 votes, and neighboring New Jersey by a similar margin. Both of these states had gone for Grant in 1872. Pennsylvania remained narrowly Republican, but Delaware switched. South of the Mason-Dixon Line, the only Republican hopes were in Florida, South Carolina, and Louisiana, where President Grant had sent troops the preceding day.
In the Midwest, it was a different story. Hayes carried both his home state and Illinois by narrow margins, but lost Indiana by an equally close vote. In the upper Midwest, and in Nebraska, Kansas, and Colorado, it was a Republican sweep. Finally the Pacific slope was heard from, and Hayes won both California and Oregon.
The complete returns—with South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana uncertain—seemed to presage a Tilden victory. But though the polls had closed throughout the country, the election was not over. General Daniel E. Sickles, on his way home from an after-theater supper, visited Republican headquarters and thought he saw hope amid the gloom. If Hayes could carry South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana, he could win by one electoral vote.
Sickles’ checkered career made him a fitting player to make the first move in the dispute over the election of 1876. He was one of the most remarkable figures in American public life in the nineteenth century. Born in 1819 and living until 1914, he combined considerable ability with considerably more ambition and a hair-trigger temper which led his biographer, W. A. Swanberg, to entitle his volume Sickles the Incredible.
Trained as a lawyer, he rose through the ranks of the Tammany machine in New York City to be elected to Congress in 1856 as a Democrat. He took with him to Washington his beautiful child bride, Teresa, whom he had married when she was sixteen. Though a womanizer himself, he was outraged to discover that the U
nited States attorney for the District of Columbia, Phillip Barton Key, a southern patrician in his fifties and a son of Francis Scott Key, was having an affair with Teresa. After waiting for Key to cross Lafayette Square in Washington on the way to his club, Sickles accosted him and then shot him dead.
He was tried for murder and defended by no fewer than eight attorneys, including Edwin M. Stanton, who would later be Lincoln’s Secretary of War. His lawyers advanced for the first time in an American trial the claim of “temporary insanity.” The jurors agreed, and Sickles was not only acquitted, but cheered by the courtroom crowd, which called for a speech.
Such an escapade would have daunted a lesser ego, but not Sickles. As soon as the Civil War broke out, he raised a brigade in New York and was commissioned a brigadier general. He saw action in the latter parts of McClellan’s peninsular campaign and at Chancellorsville, where he commanded an entire corps. His troops fought valiantly at Gettysburg, but a musket ball in his right leg required its amputation.
Out of the Army, Sickles switched parties and voted for Lincoln’s reelection in 1864. Grant appointed him ambassador to Spain, where his headstrong conduct disappointed Secretary of State Hamilton Fish. Resigning from that post, he and his French-speaking second wife settled in Paris. He was only visiting the United States for a few months at the time he became active in the Hayes campaign.
Even though he had no official position in the Republican Party on election night, he audaciously sent out telegrams to its officials in South Carolina, Florida, Louisiana, and Oregon over the name of Zachariah Chandler, the chairman of the national committee:
WITH YOUR STATE SURE FOR HAYES, HE IS ELECTED. HOLD YOUR STATE.
Early editions of morning newspapers proclaimed Tilden the victor. Democratic sheets were exultant as evidenced by the comment of the dyed-in-the-wool New York World:
The new era begins. Peace on Earth and to men of good will is the glorious message of this glorious day.1
Equally partisan, though Republican, the Indianapolis Journal editorialized:
. . . Tilden is elected. The announcement will carry pain to every loyal heart in the nation, but the inevitable truth may as well be stated. 2
But the New York Times refused to concede the election to the Democrats. Times news editor John C. Reid had been captured by the Confederates while in the Union Army and confined in the notorious Libby prison, and would not soon forget it. Together with the other members of the editorial board, he pondered what to do. Well after midnight, they received a dispatch from Dan Magone, the chairman of the New York State Democratic Committee, saying: “Please give your estimate of the electoral votes secured for Tilden. Answer at once.” The Times board realized that this meant that the Democrats were actually in doubt as to Tilden’s victory. Edward Cary, a member of the board, wrote an editorial saying that the outcome was doubtful, that Tilden appeared to have 184 electoral votes, Hayes 181, and Florida in doubt.
Before sunrise Reid went to Republican headquarters at the Fifth Avenue Hotel and found it deserted. He was looking for Zachariah Chandler, the national chairman, when he ran into W. E. Chandler, the national committeeman from New Hampshire, dressed in goggles and military greatcoat. Together they canvassed returns from across the nation and figured out how Hayes might win after all. They located the room of Zach Chandler and aroused him from what is varyingly reported to have been a sound sleep or a drunken stupor. They asked his permission to telegraph to leading Republicans in doubtful states— South Carolina, Florida, Louisiana, California, and Oregon. Zach Chandler agreed, and telegrams were accordingly sent, saying that Hayes was elected if they could hold their state—that is, assure that the electoral votes of that state would be cast for Hayes.
By the next morning, many newspapers spoke of a doubtful election, with conflicting claims to the electoral votes of Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina. It was clear that more voters across the country had voted for Tilden than had voted for Hayes. But this popular vote does not determine the winner of the presidency. It is rather the electoral vote, cast by the presidential electors in each state whose party received a majority of the popular vote in that state. Each state has an electoral vote equal to the number of senators and representatives it is allotted in Congress, and chooses that number of electors to cast its electoral vote in December. But when there is a dispute as to which candidate has won the popular vote of a state, there is a possibility that two competing sets of electors, one from each party, will each cast votes for their respective presidential candidates. The question then becomes who shall decide which set of electoral votes is to be counted.
Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution provides that
[t]he Electors shall meet in their respective states, and vote by Ballot for two persons. . . . [T]hey shall make a list of all the persons voted for, and the Number of Votes for each, which List they shall sign and certify, and transmit sealed to the Seat of the Government . . . directed to the President of the Senate. The President of the Senate shall, in the Presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the certificates, and the Votes shall then be counted.
The Constitution was silent as to who would do the counting. Was it the president of the Senate, or the two houses in joint session? The one constitutional duty assigned to the Vice President was that of presiding over the Senate, but Henry Wilson, Grant’s Vice President, had died in 1875. The presiding officer of the Senate now was its president pro-tem, Thomas W. Ferry, a Michigan Republican. The Senate was controlled by the Republicans, and the House by the Democrats.
Hayes and some of his Republican supporters contended that the decision of the Senate president as to which set of returns to count should be final. But this was not the only way to read the constitutional provisions, and the Democrats understandably would have none of it. If there were to be competing election returns, the situation cried out for a political solution.
In 1865, both houses of Congress had adopted Joint Rule 22 governing the counting of the electoral vote. It provided that “no vote objected to shall be counted except by the concurrent vote of the two Houses.” This meant that once an objection to an electoral vote was raised, it took a majority in both the House and the Senate to override the objection and count the vote. This rule was in effect when electoral votes were counted in 1865, 1869, and 1873. But in each of those years, the Republicans controlled both houses of Congress, and there was no serious dispute about the outcome of the election.
Early in 1876, in the first session of that Congress—the Senate rescinded Joint Rule 22, and on December 8 of that year, after the dispute as to the election arose, Senator Ferry ruled that it had been repealed, and he was sustained by a vote of 50 to 4. So there was no mechanism available to guide the proceedings of the joint session other than the provisions of the Constitution itself, which provided little guidance.
And looming beyond this question was the provision of Article II, providing that “if no Person have a Majority, then from the five highest on the List the said House shall in like Manner chuse the President. But in chusing the President, the Vote shall be taken by states, the representation from each State having one vote. . . .” The Democrats in the House controlled a sufficient number of state delegations in that body to elect Tilden President should it come to that.
On November 10, President Grant issued an order widely circulated throughout the country. It was addressed to General W. T. Sherman:
Instruct General Augur, in Louisiana, and General Ruger, in Florida, to be vigilant with the force at their command to preserve peace and good order, and to see that proper and legal Boards of Canvassers are unmolested in the performance of their duties. Should there be any grounds of suspicion of fraudulent counting on either side, it should be reported and denounced at once. No man worthy of the office of President would be willing to hold the office if counted in, placed there by fraud; either Party can afford to be disappointed in the result, but the country cannot afford to have t
he result tainted by the suspicion of illegal or false returns.
U. S. Grant
Republican “visiting statesmen” journeyed to the contested states, as did their Democratic counterparts, to give what aid they could to the candidates of their respective parties. On November 12, W. E. Chandler arrived in Tallahassee, the capital of Florida. Ex-Governor Noyes of Ohio, John A. Kasson of Iowa, General Lew Wallace (who would later gain literary fame by writing Ben-Hur while Governor of New Mexico Territory), and Francis C. Barlow of New York soon followed him there. The Democratic visitors included ex-Governor Brown of Georgia, C. W. Woolley and John F. Coyle of Pennsylvania, and Manton Marble, editor of the New York World. Each side interviewed witnesses and collected affidavits to make their case before the State Canvassing Board, a body charged with tallying the returns from the various counties. Nor were their activities confined to mere advocacy; offers of bribes and political patronage were made on both sides.
Louisiana also had its share of “visiting statesmen” from both parties. John Sherman, James A. Garfield, Eugene Hale, and other Republicans headed for New Orleans at the request of Grant himself. Abram Hewitt, Tilden’s campaign manager, urged Democratic bigwigs to go there and represent the party’s interest. Lyman Trumbull, a former Republican, Samuel J. Randall, Speaker of the House of Representatives, and “Marse Henry” Watterson, editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal, heeded his call. Since the state’s returning board consisted entirely of Republicans, the Republican delegation expressed its confidence in the fairness and honesty of the board, a confidence which the Democrats made clear they did not share.
Hayes was not in charge of the Republican effort to make him President. He was kept advised of some, but not all, of the activities of his partisans. John Sherman told him of the Democrats’ efforts in Louisiana to keep blacks (who would have voted Republican at that time) from voting and assured him that he would be declared the victor there in accordance with the law. Hayes responded uneasily that “we are not to allow our friends to defeat one outrage and fraud by another. There must be nothing crooked on our part.” 3 Charles Farwell, a wealthy Chicago merchant and political insider, very likely paid money to one or more of the members of the Louisiana Returning Board so that it would favor the Republicans.