For absolutely no reason at all, I thought we'd spend a little time talking about the Election of 1876 and it's fallout. First off, the 1870s were a WILD time in America. They're on that post-Civil War industrial economy where industry is booming - mainly because you had Robber Barons like Carnegie, Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, Vanderbilt, etc. absolutely wearing out the working class, and enabled to do so by the laissez-faire approach to business from the government (laissez-faire is a French term which means "hands-off" where the government, in this instance, just doesn't try to regulate business. If you can get some off-the-boat immigrant from Ireland to work for 10 cents an hour, do you, type of thing.)
1876 was also just three years after an economic depression hit that was so bad it was known as the Great Depression until 1929 when, uh, that one took the cake. The cause of that depression was railroads, which were the largest employer of Americans behind agriculture. Jay Cooke & Co. was the Union Army's financier during the Civil War and, when that war was over, the government made it a federal agent in financing railroad construction, and man they went nuts. After the Transcontinental Railroad was completed in 1869, Jay Cooke & Co. were behind the Northern Pacific Rail Road - a second transcontinental railway. But on September 18, 1873 they realized they had overextended themselves and declared bankruptcy. In the fallout, 89 of the country's 364 railroad companies had gone bankrupt. Within two years 18,000 businesses followed suit. Unemployment was at 14%. Railroad worker strikes swept across the US as wages were cut and working conditions suffered.
The 1876 presidential election was just 11 years after the end of the Civil War. Republicans (and do not forget that, from the 1850s to the 1960s, the Republicans and Democrats flipped platforms) had been overseeing Reconstruction in the South, tasked with making sure Southern states complied with the Civil War Amendments, and attempting to undo the Southern "Black Codes" designed to keep the formerly-enslaved population as second-class citizens. Two years prior, in 1874, the predominantly-Southern Democrats gained control of the House of Representatives for the first time since the Civil War as the people grew weary, in part, of Reconstruction, the Republican response to the Panic of 1873, not to mention the corruption of Ulysses S. Grant's administration, and the unending corruption of Boss Tweed's Tammany Hall outfit. With the Southern Democrats in control of Congress, the Reconstruction writing was on the wall.
The presidential election of 1876 came down to New York's Samuel Tilden vs. Ohio's Rutherford B. Hayes. It wasn't apparently a great choice for the people:
Republicans ran Ohio's Rutherford B. Hayes - a lawyer, devout Methodist father of three (soon-to-be four) who joined the Union Army despite being almost 40 years old when the Civil War broke out saying that he would rather die than live having done nothing for the Union. Wounded five times, he (obviously) survived the war and emerged as a Brigadier General. He was elected to the House of Representatives upon the end of the Civil War and then to be Governor of Ohio. But Black Americans assumed that a Hayes victory would mean the reinstatement of slavery.
Election Day came, and 82% of registered voters did vote - a number not since topped (though I'm keeping an eye out on the 2020 voter turnout). 4,036,298 votes were cast for Hayes. 4,300,590 were cast for Tilden. But, as we all know, that's not exactly what matters. That 264,000 vote margin resulted in a 184-165 Electoral College advantage for Tilden. One vote shy of a Tilden win. But three states were disputed: Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina. Coincidentally (or not), these were the only three Southern states controlled by Republicans. The combined total of Electoral College votes in Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina? 19. One Electoral Vote out of those three would give Tilden the presidency, while Hayes needed all 19 (Oregon was going through some stuff, but ultimately gave their one undecided Electoral Vote to Hayes, making it 284-266).
Both sides claimed victory in the three states. Both sides alleged fraud by the other. Democrats, with their alleged 3% margin (assuming you could trust the counting of votes throughout the country), declared "Tilden or War." An article in the October 1893 issue of The Atlantic, retelling the Election of 1876, said:
Those of each party were convinced that they had gained an honest victory, and were indignant with those of the other party for denying or even doubting it. The feeling of mutual hostility had been greatly intensified by party leaders, orators, and presses. In some of our cities it took all the terrors of a police court to keep Democrats and Republicans from breaking the peace. Members of Congress who had begun by being angry on their own account, and who felt under some obligation to represent the anger of their constituents, exploded when they began to discuss the subject with their opponents, at the hotels and in the club-rooms of the city of Washington. It took quiet and sensible men some time to learn that they could gain nothing by arguing the question with those of opposite political views, and men of a different stamp never did learn it.
There's that rhyming couplet of history.
How would Congress react? Some argued that the President of the Senate should determine the votes, since it was that position that had counted and declared the Electoral College vote since American government had been a thing. But the President of the Senate was a Republican, and Democrats would never accept a result by a Republican. Another argument was that the House of Representatives should determine the votes, since that body is where the election goes if there isn't a majority in the Electoral College. But the Democrats controlled the House, and Republicans would never accept a result by a Democrat. A third argument was to let the Supreme Court decide the election since it was, theoretically, at least, an impartial body. But seven members of the Supreme Court at that time were appointed by Republicans, and Democrats would have hollered. A "leading Democrat" (according to the 1893 article in The Atlantic) remarked on the floor of the House that "within 100 Days, people would be cutting each other's throats."
Faced with the challenge of how to deal with votes from three states neither side totally trusted, a compromise was made by the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives and the Republican-controlled Senate: create a bipartisan commission of five members from the House (three Democrats and two Republicans), five from the Senate (three Republicans and two Democrats), and five Supreme Court justices (two appointed by Democrat presidents, two appointed by Republican presidents, and one independent) called the Electoral Commission to determine how to allot the 19 remaining votes in the Electoral College. When the Joint Session of Congress began on February 1, 1877, the Electoral Commission got to work. A large crowd gathered in the gallery as the Florida returns were being counted. The New York Times wrote:
There was a great desire to witness a fair count, and curiosity was increased by the expectation that the new law would afford some new diversion to the formality of the counting.
The inner workings of the Electoral Commission can be studied more deeply by clicking on any of the above links. In the interest of Doing Something Else tonight, let's say that perhaps a deal was inevitable. Republicans wanted the presidency. Democrats wanted federal troops and federal oversight out of their states. Nicholas E. Hollis tells us about the Wormley Agreement, in which representatives of both campaigns met at Washington's Wormley Hotel - a block northeast of Lafayette Square - which was founded by James Wormley (worthy of a separate post), whose father had obtained his certificate of freedom with the help of lawyer Francis Scott Key, and turned the hotel into "an internationally-renowned hospitality business catering to the most prominent visitors and residents of the capital." At the Wormley, however, it was proposed that the three contested states - Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina - would award their votes to Hayes in exchange for Republicans agreeing to remove federal troops from those states.
At 4:10am on the morning of March 2, 1877 - a mere two days before the inauguration of whoever won - all three states gave their Electoral Votes to Hayes, giving the Republican Hayes a 285-284 result in the 1876 Electoral College in exchange for the end of Reconstruction. Republicans sold out Black citizens for almost 100 years in exchange for four years of the presidency. What came next for Black Americans was generations of segregation, Black Codes, Plessy v. Ferguson, and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan. Again we turn to Congressman Monroe:
Again, we see how absurd has been the statement that there was fraud in the count, that somebody was cheated by the manner in which it was conducted. The simple narrative of facts which has now been given refutes such a charge. If anybody was cheated, who was it? Certainly not the Republicans; for their candidate was made President. Nor was it the Democrats; for the bill in accordance with which the electoral votes were ascertained and declared was specifically their measure.
The cheated number was the Black community of the United States of America - who at that point had gone from "Property" to "Citizens" by a significant portion of the country in less than 12 years. Within two months of taking office, Hayes removed federal troops from surrounding the statehouses in South Carolina and Florida. Republican James Garfield won the election of 1880 by less than 10,000 votes out of over nine million ballots cast. Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina all voted for the Democratic candidate Winfield S. Hancock.
