The Stolen Election: Hayes Versus Tilden—1876 - Softcover

Robinson, Lloyd

3.95

21 ratings by Goodreads

9780765302069: The Stolen Election: Hayes Versus Tilden—1876

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0765302063 ISBN 13: 9780765302069

Publisher: Forge Books, 2001

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A screamingly close presidential election. Allegations of fraud. Democrats and republicans, North and South, black and white--all at loggerheads.

With each passing day, the conflict becomes more complex. Hard-eyed political operatives from both parties rush south to fight on every front. "Spin" is everywhere, he truth hardly to be found. From coast to coast, American alternate between anger astonishment, and despair.

One candidate got more popular votes. But he will ultimately be defeated by an astonishing sequence of events--culminating in the tie-breaking vote of a single Justice of the United States Supreme Court.

It's not the year 2000. It's 1876.

It' the election that ended the Civil War--and set the stage fro eighty bitter years of segregation in the South. We live in its shadow still.

Read the full story. You'll never look at American politics the same way again.

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About the Author:

LLOYD ROBINSON is a pseudonym of novelist Robert Silverberg. Under his own name, Silverberg is the author of many works of popular history, including Empires of the Dust(Chilton, 1963), Akhneton: The Rebel Pharoah (Chilton, 1964), Ghost Towns of the American West (Ohio University Press, 1968), If I Forget Thee, O Jerusalem:Amercan Jews and the State of Israel (Morrow, 1970), The Longest Voyage:Circumnavigation in the Age of Discovery, (Bobbs-Merrill, 1972), The Realm of Prester John (Doubleday, 1972), and The Mound Builders (Ballantine, 1974).

1

North Against South

Nearly everyone knows the names of our first few Presidents: Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, those dignified and remote figures who took part in the birth of the united States. And the names of our recent Presidents are familiar, too: Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy. But some of the men who have occupied the White House are anything but vivid to us. It is hard to think of much to say about the Presidents who lived just before the Civil War, for example: Taylor, Fillmore, Pierce, Buchanan. And there is that other group of Chief Executives from the late nineteenth century who tend to blur into vagueness for us: Tilden, Arthur, Benjamin Harrison, Garfield--
Tilden?
Of course. Samuel Jones Tilden (1814-1886), the nineteenth President of the United States, elected on November 7, 1876, as the candidate of the Democratic Party to succeed the outgoing President Ulysses S. Grant.
The name seems even less familiar than others of its period. The words "President" and "Tilden" do not go naturally together, as they do for President Arthur, President Garfield, President Harrison, and the rest. And there is a good reason for that. Samuel J. Tilden was never inaugurated. He never resided in the White House or signed a single bill into law. In fact, although he won the election, he never became President, and was forced to stand by helplessly while the man he defeated, Rutherford B. Hayes, took possession of the nation's highest office.
Tilden was the victim of the greatest fraud in American political history. He received a quarter of a million more votes than his opponent. That in itself would not make a man President, for in our double system of voting we choose, not a Presidential candidate, but an Electoral College that meets to select the winner of the election. A man may lead in the popular vote and still not be chosen by the Electoral College. But Tilden also received a clear majority of the Electoral College--at least, when the first votes came in.
Nevertheless, he did not win. On the night of the election, Hayes and the Republicans went to bed thinking they had been beaten; Tilden and the Democrats celebrated their victory. In the morning, though, schemes were hatched and hurried conferences were held, and the process of reversing the decision of the voters got under way. That process dragged on for months, while the leaders of the nation debated and the citizens looked on in dismay and wonder. Election returns were thrown out by special committees. The votes of certain states were taken away from the Democrats and given to the Republicans. Confusion followed upon confusion. Both sides engaged in bribery, lawlessness, and trickery. The clock ticked out the final hours of President Grant's term of office, and still there was no one to take his place. Who would be President? What would happen to the country if Grant's term ended and no new President had been chosen? Would a second Civil War break out? Would there be a dictatorship? Would the Constitution collapse?
At the last moment the crisis was settled. The Republican, Hayes, took the Presidential oath. Some 30,000 Americans cheered the new President at his inauguration on March 5, 1877. Meanwhile other thousands of Americans sent letters and telegrams to Samuel J. Tilden, telling him that they still believed him to be the true President and urging him to seize power in the land. But Tilden accepted the verdict that had been forced on him. He could have fought the decision and perhaps split the nation by civil war, but he did not. Though privately convinced he should have been President, he told his supporters to give their allegiance to Hayes. And so the strangest and most controversial of American elections came to its end. The United States had survived a great crisis; it had shown that even in such a bizarre contest the result could be an orderly and peaceful transfer of power.
How could such an election have come about, though? How could a winner be transformed into a loser, and a loser into a winner? What were the circumstances that produced so unique a situation? And--was it really unique? Could something like the Hayes-Tilden election ever happen here again? Or is the stolen election of 1876 merely a chapter out of our picturesque past, something that now appears quaint and funny, an event from a distant era when it did not matter very much at all who was President of the United States?
Some of these questions can be answered easily. We know the means by which the presidency was taken away from Tilden and awarded to Hayes. We know something about the secret deals that brought this result about. We understand the forces that made the fraud possible.
But we cannot be certain that something like it will never happen again. Many of the angers and hatreds that turned the Election of 1876 into the Compromise of 1877 are still loose in our land--in somewhat different forms, true, but they still exist. Nor has there been any basic change in the way we elect our Presidents--a method which has several dangerous flaws. Most of the time, the system works smoothly and well; but on a few occasions in our past it has broken down, never more disastrously than in 1876. What happened then may one day have an ugly encore and send a shock wave of chaos rippling through the world--although we tell ourselves that it is not very likely.
* * *
Rutherford B. Hayes was a solemn but good-natured man, a hard worker, a loving husband and father, a capable public servant. He had fought and had been wounded in the Civil War; he had been elected to Congress and had been Governor of Ohio three times; he was honest, handsome, and sincere. He was popular among the citizens and he had no enemies among the professional politicians. He was the sort of man of whom it is often said that he was born to be President. Yet the voters did not elect him.
Samuel J. Tilden was an icy, aloof man with a forbidding manner and no fondness for public life. He was a bachelor. He had not taken any part in the Civil War; he was unimpressive physically; his health was poor. He had amassed millions of dollars through his cleverness as a lawyer. His cold, penetrating intellect was so brilliant that he made his own friends uncomfortable. He was a New Yorker, and the rest of the country tends to be suspicious of New Yorkers, especially if they are wealthy and brilliant. (Hayes was from Ohio, the heart of the land.) Tilden did not have the personal magnetism a successful candidate must have to win the support of the people, and professional politicians of both parties hated him because he had exposed their thievery. Yet the voters elected him President.
So it was not a contest of personalities. If it had been, Hayes would have won in a landslide. But in those days before radio and television, the personalities of the candidates did not matter much to the voters. The candidates stayed on their own front porches, making few speeches and never going on a campaign tour. The voters made their decisions on the basis of ideas and issues--not on how a man looked or how warmly he smiled.
The main issue of 1876 was North versus South.
That may sound a little strange. North versus South was the issue of 1860, after all. When Abraham Lincoln won the election that year--the first candidate of the Republican Party to become President--a group of southern states broke away from the Union. The leaders of the South feared that the new President would attempt to put an end to slavery; and so the South declared itself to be an independent nation, the Confederate States of America, where the white man would always have the right to make a slave of the black man. The North refused to allow such a nation to come into being. The bitter war of 1861-65 followed--America's greatest tragedy, with brother fighting against brother on American soil.
The powerful industrial North triumphed over the weak rural South. By the spring of 1865 the war was over. Slavery was abolished in the United States. The South, devastated by invasion and famine, was in ruins. The Confederacy was dead. Now was the time for the healing of the nation's wounds, for the joining of South to North once more. President Lincoln faced the problem of bringing the seceding states back into the Union and making them full partners in America again. It was a difficult task, calling for equal measures of forgiveness and sternness; but the warm, great-hearted Lincoln hoped that he could create harmony and win the allegiance of all Americans, Northerners and Southerners, white men and black.
He never got the chance. An assassin's bullet took his life just at the moment of victory. As the reunited nation faced the terrible challenges of peacetime, it found itself led by a new man, one who had never been meant to be President. And in the mistakes and confusions of the months just after the Civil War were planted the seeds of the conflict of 1876. The Hayes-Tilden election was actually the final act of the tragedy that had begun in 1860. One of the strangest aspects of this strange election is that the wrong man turned out to be the right man: Hayes, who should not have been President, brought the agonizing struggle of North against South to a close, which Tilden probably could not have done.
To understand what happened in 1876, we have to go back to April 14, 1865--less than a week after the end of the Civil War. President Lincoln, that night, went to Ford's Theater in Washington. An unemployed southern actor by the name of John Wilkes Booth, who hated Lincoln for freeing the slaves, stepped into the President's box and fired a single shot. By morning, Andrew Johnson of Tennessee was President.
Only weeks before his death, Lincoln had declared, "With malice toward none; with charity for all...let us strive...to bind up the nation's wounds." Now it was Johnson's assignment to bind those wounds, but Johnson was not the great man Lincoln had been. Lincoln had picked him to run for Vice-President in 1864 because he was a rarity, a Southerner who opposed slavery and supported the North in the Civil War. Johnson, a rough, poorly educated man from the Tennessee hills, had been Senator from Tennessee until it seceded from the Union, and later had been its military governor when it was conquered by the North. He did not even belong to the same political party as Lincoln, for Johnson was a Democrat. As a step toward national unity, Lincoln had tried to bring together the Republicans and the anti-slavery Democrats into a new party, the Union Party. This step was not entirely popular with Lincoln's fellow Republicans. When Lincoln said he would like Andrew Johnson to run with him, the fiery Representative Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, the most powerful Republican in Congress, grumbled, "Can't you get a candidate for Vice-President without going down into a damned rebel province for one?"
Now the "damned rebel" Johnson was in the White House. The men of the North, who had fought and won a war to keep the Union free, wondered what the new President's policy toward the defeated South would be. His past record was good. He had been the only senator from a Confederate state to remain loyal to the Union, even though he had been driven into exile when Tennessee seceded. All during the war he had backed the North against his native South. Would he now continue to be tough with the seceders? Or would he try to win favor in the South by showing mercy?
A strong faction of Republicans, headed by Thad Stevens, had no sympathy at all for the defeated South. "Humble the proud traitors," Stevens declared. He wanted the South treated as a conquered province that the North could rule as it saw fit. Divide up the great plantations of the rebels, said Stevens, and sell the land at low prices to ex-slaves. Allow the freed slaves to vote and to run for public office. Take all political power away from the white aristocracy of the South, and hang the leaders of the secession. Those who agreed with the harsh, unforgiving Stevens were known as Radical Republicans. They meant to make sure that the southern whites knew the South had lost the war. The Radical Republicans had another motive, too: they expected that all the new Negro voters in the South would vote Republican, since the Democratic Party was the party of the slaveowners. Thus, bolstered by the votes of hundreds of thousands of former slaves, the Republicans would remain in power indefinitely.
But Andrew Johnson, as President, turned out to be mild in his treatment of the South. He tried to guide himself by Lincoln's words and to show malice toward none, charity for all. Acting in what he thought were the best interests of the entire nation, President Johnson proclaimed a general pardon for most of the Confederate soldiers and refused to execute the rebel leaders. Under his program of "Restoration," he took no action to confiscate rebel property, to take away the citizenship of those who had seceded, or to grant equal rights to the Negroes. He wanted to move gradually on the question of letting ex-slaves vote and hold office, hoping that time would end the bitterness between white and black in the South. He planned to let the eleven Confederate states back into the Union with their old white leaders still in control. In August 1866 President Johnson announced, not very realistically, that "peace, order, tranquality, and civil authority now exist in and throughout the whole of the United States."
He was wrong. In the South, the whites who had been restored to power were quick to take advantage of their unexpected good fortune. They passed "Black Laws" forcing the freed slaves to accept wages and working conditions imposed by their old owners, and forbidding them from exercising the rights of free men. Northerners were horrified. It looked as though President Johnson had canceled the effects of the Civil War overnight, by letting the losers live much as they had lived before. Such newspapers as the Chicago Tribune denounced the Black Laws, declaring, "We tell the white men of Mississippi that the men of the North will convert the State of Mississippi into a frog pond before they will allow any such laws to disgrace one foot of soil in which the bones of our soldiers sleep and over which the flag of freedom waves."
The Radical Republicans in particular were horrified by Johnson's "treason." It shocked them that the white Southerners were not being made to pay a heavy price for their rebellion. And they feared that soon the restored southern states would be sending so many Democratic Representatives and Senators to Washington that Republican power would be broken. The bitter, vindictive Thad Stevens goaded the Radical Republicans into action.
When Congress met late in 1865, the Radicals pushed through a ruling that no Congressmen-elect from the former Confederate states would be allowed to take their seats until there had been a full investigation. A committee of fifteen was appointed to investigate--with Thad Stevens as its chairman. Naturally, none of the Southerners were allowed into Congress. That took care of the immediate threat to Radical control.
Next, Congress forced through two bills granting citizenship and civil rights to Negroes. These measures were designed to cope with the Black Laws of the...

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