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Reunion and Reaction: The Compromise of 1877 and the End of Reconstruction
CHAPTER I
The Unknown Compromise
FIVE TIMES in the course of the nineteenth century there arose political crises of such gravity as to call forth all the celebrated American genius for compromise. Four of these crises involved the threat of disunion or violence, if not war. In only one of them did the customary way of compromise fail, the threats materialize, and the crisis end in tragedy . All the others were settled by compromises that form some of the most important chapters in American history.
Compromise became part and parcel of the basic pattern of American political life. The one great departure from the tradition occurred in 1861 and the sixteen years that followed. In the clash between “right” on the side of the North and “rights” on the side of the South the normal processes of compromise broke down. Americans resorted to armed force to settle their differences. After the trial by battle the victors dictated the peace and imposed terms by force. For this brief and entirely exceptional period principles held sway and differences were framed in terms of moral issues. So long as this was true there was no room for compromise, for compromise had to come at the expense of principle. Neither side to the dispute could be permitted a monopoly of rectitude, and concessions were required of both. Principles had to give way to expediency and force to persuasion.
The Compromise of 1877 marked the abandonment of principles and of force and a return to the traditional ways of expediency and concession. The compromise laid the political foundation for reunion. It established a new sectional truce that proved more enduring than any previous one and provided a settlement for an issue that had troubled American politics for more than a generation. It wrote an end to Reconstruction and recognized a new regime in the South. More profoundly than Constitutional amendments and wordy statutes it shaped the future of four million freedmen and their progeny for generations to come. It preserved one part of the fruits of the “Second American Revolution ” — the pragmatic and economic part — at the expense of the other part — the idealistic and humanitarian part. The settlement was not ideal from any point of view, nor was it very logical either. But that is the way of compromises.
In spite of the fact that the Compromise of 1877 proved more enduring in its basic aspects than any of its predecessors there has been less known about it than about any of them. The terms of the historic Compromises of 1820, 1833, and 1850 were publicly debated, openly arrived at, and published that all might read. Those who attempted to frame a Compromise of 1861 proceeded in the same manner until overwhelmed with failure. In all of them both of the parties to the dispute were called upon to surrender cherished hopes and claims in exchange for the concession of half measures and a suitable quid pro quo. There was usually a great deal of haggling over terms in the august oratory of the age. In the end an inspired leader — Henry Clay in the first three instances — brought forward a solution that overcame remaining objections and the compromise was made.
Such was the nature of the Compromise of 1877, however, and so dangerous was believed the menace of war or anarchy, that negotiations for an agreement were conducted secretly or in an extremely guarded fashion. The fact that Southern Democrats were in effect going behind the backs of the Northern members of their own party to arrive at an understanding with the Republicans was not conducive to publicity. Nor was the fact that the Republican managers were abandoning the platform on which they were elected and forfeiting principles to which a powerful wing of their party still clung . The diplomacy of 1877 might be described as secret covenants privately arrived at. The terms were never officially published, for neither party to the contract could afford to endorse all of the agreements publicly. Nor did some of the more important articles materialize as events. In some cases they proved impossible of fulfillment, and in others promises were broken or forgotten.
Remarkably few leaders were fully informed of the compromise proceedings, and those who were kept their counsel in later years. In 1937, sixty years after the event, Abram S. Hewitt’s “Secret History” of the crisis was published. 1 This valuable document revealed much that had not been known and settled several controversies. But Hewitt was spokesman of the wing of Democrats that was bypassed and, some charged, betrayed by the compromise. If he was ever fully informed of the negotiations his “Secret History” does not reveal the fact. Milton H. Northrup, secretary of one of the congressional committees that studied the problem, wrote an “Inner History” of the events, but he was not concerned with aspects that lay beneath the surface. 2
During his lifetime Henry Watterson published what he called an “Inside History” of the crisis. The Kentuckian was matters should remain a sealed book in my memory. I make no issue of veracity with the living; the dead should be sacred.” He then told the story of a gay dinner party in Washington during Cleveland’s first administration. It was a small convivial affair attended by the President. Among the guests were “two leading Democrats and two leading Republicans,” identified only as having important roles in the crisis of ’77. Late in the evening the four politicians began vying with each other in revealing secrets of the disputed election. “The little audience was rapt,” recalled Watterson. “Finally Mr. Cleveland raised both hands and exclaimed, ‘What would the people of this country think if the roof could be lifted from this house and they could hear these men.’” Whereupon one of the raconteurs, “noted for his wealth both of money and humor,” declared, “If anyone repeats what I have said I will denounce him as a liar.” Watterson himself was confident that “the whole truth underlying the determinate incidents which led to the rejection of Tilden and the seating of Hayes will never be known.” 3
Modern historians have risen to this challenge and made repeated efforts to penetrate the curtain of silence deliberately dropped upon the past. But the more candid of them have confessed dissatisfaction with their results and pointed out the need for more illumination or despaired of ever gaining it. Thus one historian, who has written extensively on the subject and on figures prominent in the period, echoes Watterson when he writes of certain crucial events in the story that “the full truth will never be known.” 4
The “whole truth,” as any historian knows, is a necessary fiction of the courtroom and the witness stand. It is admittedly an unattainable goal in the reconstruction of the past. Large parts of the truth regarding the subject of the present work are available in many books, the work of numerous minds. It is remarkable, however, that so many of what Watterson called the “determinate incidents,” the forces underlying events, have been neglected or overlooked for three quarters of a century.
“But isn’t the ‘Bargain of 1877’ an old story?” it will be asked. “Was it not the result of something called the Wormley Conference in Washington?” It is true that this story has a place reserved in every history schoolbook and that it has been treated with more or less seriousness by the more detailed accounts of the crisis. It has been accepted as explaining why the Southern Democrats, convinced to a man that Samuel J. Tilden had been legally elected President and hating everything that Republicanism stood for, were persuaded to desert the Democratic cause and assist in the seating of Rutherford B. Hayes, even though they had within their power the means of preventing what they believed to be a gigantic fraud.
The circumstances of the “Bargain” will be readily recalled. It was the last week of Grant’s second administration and no successor had been chosen . Democrats in the House of Representatives, where the party enjoyed a large majority, were threatening by dilatory and filibustering tactics to prevent the completion of the electoral count before March 4. Should they be successful many people expected fighting to break out — “more people,” according to one historian, “than had anticipated a like outcome to the secession movement of 1860– 61.” 5
Describing “the excitement and the apprehension which prevailed throughout the country,” Hewitt wrote: “Business was arrested, the wheels of industry ceased to move, and it seemed as if the terrors of civil war were again to be renewed.” In fact, he added, “to this dread issue we were much nearer than was even at that time supposed .” He knew of fifteen states in which Democratic forces composed largely of war veterans were organized and prepared to move on Washington to compel the inauguration of Tilden. The commander-in-chief had been selected, and “the governors of many states,” Hewitt wrote without specifying, and with probable exaggeration, had declared their willingness to use military force if necessary. 6
At the very climax of this crisis, so the story goes, on February 26 and 27 intimate friends of Governor Hayes came to an understanding with a group of Southern representatives in a series of conferences. The upshot of these conferences was that the Republicans agreed to abandon the two remaining Republican governments in the South, those of Louisiana and South Carolina, in favor of the Democratic claimants. On their part the Southerners promised to defeat their party’s filibuster, assist in completing the count, and see that Hayes was peacefully inaugurated. In effect, the Southerners were abandoning the cause of Tilden in exchange for control over two states, and the Republicans were abandoning the cause of the Negro in exchange for the peaceful possession of the Presidency. As part of the arrangement, however, the Southern representatives promised that the rights of the Negro would be safeguarded and that there would be no bloody reprisals against political enemies, while the Republican spokesmen undertook to persuade President Grant to withdraw Federal troops from the South as soon as the electoral count was completed and promised that if they were not successful in this effort Hayes would withdraw the troops after his inauguration. Two days later, after an impassioned appeal in the House by a Louisianan, the Democratic filibuster collapsed, the count was completed, and Hayes was declared elected.
This in summary is the traditional account of the Bargain of 1877. To explain the inadequacy of this account and place on record the large aspects it omits will require the remaining pages of this book. In passing, however, it might be mentioned that at the time the Wormley Conference was held and the so-called Bargain struck the Southerners were already committed to the course they pursued and Hayes was already committed to a policy of conciliating the South. The question of the removal of the troops is of particular interest. Everyone assumed as a matter of course that the collapse of the Republican regimes and the succession of the Democrats — or “Redemption” and “Home-Rule,” as Southerners described it — would follow as soon as the troops were withdrawn. This has been presented as the critical point of the Wormley Conference and the quid pro quo of the Bargain from the Southern point of view. But the fact was that a week before these negotiations opened a means had been devised to insure the removal of the troops in case Hayes forgot his promises or was unable to carry them out. At a Democratic caucus on February 19,1877, a majority of the members voted for a resolution to write into the army appropriations bill, then still pending, a clause forbidding the use of troops to support the claims of any state government in the South until it should be recognized by Congress. A bill containing such a clause was passed by the House and a penalty of hard labor and imprisonment provided for anyone found guilty of violating the act. When the Republican Senate refused to accept the clause the House stood its ground and adjourned without making any appropriations for the army whatever.
After he became President, the only way Hayes could get provisions, pay, and transportation for the army after the end of the fiscal year was to call an extra session of Congress. Since the new House would also have a hostile majority, Hayes postponed the extra session for seven months. He was thus compelled to rely upon unpaid and unhappy officers and men to suppress the violent labor upheavals in several states in August 1877. The army remained unpaid and unhappy until November 30, after Congress finally relented. 7
This was the situation to which Mrs. Hayes referred in August 1877 when, during a conversation with Thomas Donaldson regarding the President’s abandonment of the Republican governors in the: South, she exclaimed: “Why, what could Mr. Hayes do but what he did? He had no army.” 8 The President himself, talking with Don aldson at the White House on the same subject in October, remarked: “In addition, the House was against me and I had no army, and public sentiment demanded a change of policy.” 9 Senator Oliver P. Morton of Indiana, while deploring the policy, completely absolved Hayes from blame for deserting the Carpetbaggers and placed the responsibility upon the stubborn majority of the House. 10
In saying that “public sentiment demanded a change of policy,” Hayes was acknowledging the power of a force so strong that it had compelled President Grant to give up his own policy of intervening with force in the South to uphold Republican governments. During the last three months of his administration he maintained a benevolent neutrality that enabled the “Redeemers” of Louisiana and South Carolina to establish de facto control over those states and left the Carpetbaggers with a mere shadow of authority . On February 26 Grant publicly admitted that the people of the country were “clearly opposed to the further use of troops in upholding a state government.” He also promised the Southerners to recall the troops as soon as the electoral count was completed, and that he did not succeed in fulfilling that promise does not appear to have been his fault. 11 Grant deserves much of the credit or blame that has been assigned to Hayes for initiating the new Southern policy.
In effect, Hayes’s friends at the Wormley Conference were giving up something they no longer really possessed in exchange for something that had already been secured by other means. While on the other hand the Southerners were solemnly accepting something that had been secured by other means in exchange for adherence to a course to which, by that time, they were already committed. It was, on the whole, one of the strangest bargains in the annals of horse swapping.
The Bargain nevertheless had its practical uses and consequences — though not those popularly presumed. Shortly after the inauguration of Hayes certain Southern participants in the Bargain turned over some of the documents involved to the press and gave copious interviews in which they revealed the details of the negotiations. 12 By their own admission these men had been under severe criticism from their constituents for some time prior to the Bargain because of their co-operation with the Republicans, a course they had been pursuing for several weeks. Their press interviews, widely quoted and commented upon, did not underestimate the contribution these gentlemen had made to statesmanship, nor the dramatic circumstances of their effort. Their stories of the Bargain served as a plausible justification of a course that had been the subject of angry criticism at home. They also served to magnify the role that certain politicians played in Redemption and to enhance their reputation as Redeemers. And finally, although Hayes had been previously committed to conciliatory Southern policy, and his hand had been forced by withholding of the army appropriation, the Bargain pledges of his friends may have assisted in smoothing the path for an early fulfillment of his policy.
Although the much-publicized Bargain story falls far short of being adequate, it has nevertheless been taken seriously by historians from the time of its origin. The continued stress, and even a renewed emphasis upon the story, is reflected by the most recent biographer of President Hayes. “The bargain with Hayes,” he writes, “was one of the most important events in American history. It ended the Reconstruction and started the South on the road to prosperity and power.” 13
An event of anything like the importance attributed to this deserves a much more searching analysis than it has ever had. In the first place the Compromise of 1877 was not arrived at in two days of last-minute haggling. Instead , the negotiations stretched over a period of several months . They were not confined to a settlement of the domestic affairs of two states. For in the expanse of territory and the variety of interests embraced, the Compromise of 1877 is readily comparable with the classical compromises that preceded it. These interests ranged from the Eastern seaboard to the Pacific coast . The negotiators concerned themselves not merely with the political problems of two Southern states but with the economic, social, and political problems of the whole South. They sought the fulfillment of Southern hopes and aspirations that were older than the Civil War, as well as relief from grievances arising out of Reconstruction. They enlisted in their efforts the aid of the most powerful capitalists in the country and bestirred the civic ambitions of points as remote as San Diego and Philadelphia, New Orleans and Chicago. They planned a reorientation of Southern politics along the old Democratic-Whig lines and a breaking up of the incipient white solidarity of the region by converting conservative whites to Republicanism.
Much more was at stake in the winter of 1876– 1877 than the Presidency, the question of whether Samuel J. Tilden or Rutherford B. Hayes would occupy the White House. To many people in the North it appeared that all the hard -won fruits of the Civil War were in danger of being lost or placed in serious jeopardy. On one plane there were the more idealistic aims of the North’s Civil War and Reconstruction policies, the aims centered around the freeing and protection of the Negro and reflected in the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution. On a different plane there were the less idealistic, less publicized aims of Northern policy during the war and the period following. These aims centered in the protection of a sectional economy and numerous privileged interests, and were reflected in new statutes regarding taxes, money, tariffs, banks, land, railroads, subsidies, all placed upon the law books while the South was out of the Union. Should it come to a choice of saving the fruits of Northern policy on one plane at the cost of sacrificing those on the other, Northern sentiment would be confronted with a serious dilemma.
It was a depression year, the worst year of the severest depression yet experienced. In the East labor and the unemployed were in a bitter and violent temper that foreshadowed the unprecedented upheaval of the summer . Out West a tide of agrarian radicalism was rising in the shape of Granger, Greenbacker, and Silverite heresies . From both East and West there came threats against the elaborate structure of protective tariffs, national banks, railroad subsidies, and monetary arrangements upon which the new economic order was founded.
And now the South, the eleven former Confederate states under control of new leaders, presented a third threat to the new order. Traditionally hostile to the new capitalistic arrangements, kept at bay for sixteen years, believed to be nursing bitter grievances, and suspected of harboring all manner of mischief, the South was at last returning in full force, united as never before, to upset the sectional balance of power. So long as Republican rule lasted in the South the region had proved a bulwark to the new economic order, for however radical the party had been in realizing its more idealistic aims of equality and freedom within the South, the congressmen it sent to Washington had voted solidly with Northern Republicans in support of the more pragmatic aims of economic privilege. But how would the South, under guidance of the Redeemers, cast her weight in the impending struggle over national issues? Would she make common cause with other rebellious elements? Would she join hands with restless labor in the East as she had in Jackson’s time? Or would she, as many feared and predicted , rush into the arms of her ante-bellum ally, the agrarian West, break up the East-West alliance that won the war, and throw the East back into the position of an isolated minority section? Or, finally, could the South be induced to combine with the Northern conservatives and become a prop instead of a menace to the new capitalist order ? If so, what inducements would be found necessary? These questions figured in the deliberations of those who sought a practical solution to the electoral crisis and played their part in the Compromise of 1877.
There was something else at stake, and it was probably of more consequence in the long run than any of the previous considerations. This was the question of whether the country could regain the ability to settle Presidential elections without the resort to force. The South had seceded in 1860 rather than accept the peacefully and regularly elected President. In 1864, 1868, and 1872 the election had turned in the last analysis on the employment of military force, or the threat of it. And again in 1876 the election hung upon returns from state governments that were maintained in power only by the employment of Federal troops for their protection. This time, however, there were large elements of the disappointed party who threatened to answer force with force rather than accept defeat as a result of the returns from the garrisoned Southern states. In the phraseology of the seventies, the question was, had American politics become permanently “Mexicanized” since 1860?
A candid survey of recent history did not provide a reassuring answer to the question. 14 Reliance upon force as a means of solving political problems had become almost a habit. Not only did North and South employ force without stint against each other during four years of war, but each side resorted to force to repress criticism and dissent within its own borders. For a brief interlude after the war Lincoln and later Johnson sought to return to the old way of persuasion in dealing with the South. Their program was restoration instead of reconstruction, and their method was conciliation instead of coercion. Electorates based largely on ante-bellum qualifications, and therefore excluding the Negroes, chose delegates who revised the old state constitutions, and voters elected new legislatures , state officials, and congressmen. In August 1866 President Johnson announced hopefully that “peace, order, tranquility, and civil authority now exist in and throughout the whole of the United States.”
The announcement was premature. Johnson had evaded the question of Negro suffrage and civil rights, avoided revolutionary social changes, and tolerated the election of old leaders to office. The program of moderation proved vulnerable to attack by radicals who sought deeper changes in Southern society . Shrewdly enlisting the support of humanitarians who were concerned purely with protecting the Negro, and combining them with economic interests that feared the return of Southern Democratic congressmen as a menace to newly won privileges, the Radical Republican faction captured control of Congress in the elections of 1866.
Again coercion and force became the order of the day.Declaring the state governments created under Johnson nonexistent, the Radicals divided ten Southern states into five military districts and put them under the rule of major generals and an army of occupation. Frankly revolutionary in mood, Thaddeus Stevens and his followers overrode constitutional restraints right and left. They created a new electorate of more than 700,000 Negroes and pared down the white voters by disfranchisement to a total of some 627,000. The Radicals displaced six governors and supplanted thousands of lesser officials with their own men; they purged three legislatures of conservative members, threw out laws that displeased them, suppressed or ignored civil courts, denied the right to trial by jury, and violated freedom of press and speech.
All this was done, of course, in the name of democracy. And in truth history does not record a more drastic application of the democratic dogma. In addition to the sudden creation of the new Negro electorate, the Radicals set up new state constitutions that were several leaps ahead of the old ones in a progressive direction. They reformed judicial procedure, court organization , and county organization, and established, on paper at least, a broad conception of the government’s responsibility for the people’s welfare that was new to the South.
Reconstruction was, nevertheless, an unfair test of the democratic faith as well as an unfair test of the Negro’s capacity for self-government . Historically, revolutions of this magnitude have merely registered gains in economic power and social position that the emergent class had made prior to the revolution. This was not true of the freedmen. They had accumulated no such social and economic resources. They were not in command of their own revolution, nor did they “dominate” the whites. They were controlled, sometimes by sincere idealists, but too often by men who brought discredit upon the new governments.
Radical state governments began to topple early, partly from internal weaknesses and partly from determined attacks of the Southern white opposition. The strategy of the opposition was to meet force with force, and the response of the Federal government was more force. Repeated intervention with troops kept states of the Lower South in Radical hands for a time, but by the end of 1874 all but four states had slipped in large measure out of their grasp. That year the Republicans lost control of the lower House of the national government. Their prospects for the next election were not encouraging.
The Presidential election of 1876 stirred the country more deeply than any since 1860. It was the first election in two decades in which the major parties were of something like equal strength. An advantage of the Democrats lay in the series of congressional investigations of the Grant administration that had spread before the public a record of shameless graft and corruption permeating nearly all departments. So thoroughly had the reformers done their work of exposing the scandals of “Grantism” that Grant’s own party could only appeal to the voters in the centennial election on the ground that the next Republican administration would be completely unlike the previous one. Partisan passions on both sides, however, exaggerated the sharpness of the issues of the election. In Tilden, governor of New York, and Hayes, governor of Ohio, each party had nominated a reform candidate. And each of them
had written a reformer’s platform. The issue of reform, therefore, seemed to have been largely settled before the election.
The Carpetbagger governments in the South shared the evil reputation earned among the reformers, independents , and Liberal Republicans by Grant’s administration in Washington. The reformers, offended by the Carpetbaggers’ record of corruption, did not stop to ask who bribed the Carpetbaggers, nor did they stop to reflect that the New York legislature, which had no Negro and Carpetbagger members, had probably been during the Reconstruction period as corrupt as any state legislature in the South. Nor were the reformers fair in blaming all Northern politicians operating in the South for the grave offenses undoubtedly committed by some of them. In this the influence of Redemption propaganda may be detected. If Reconstruction was a mixture of altruistic and selfish social motives, however, the Carpetbaggers reflected the same ambivalence. There were idealists as well as adventurers among them. But by 1876 the latter were the more conspicuous both on the local and on the national scene, and they contributed to the heavy burden of defense the Republican party had to bear in the Presidential election of that year. 15
All over the country the first available election returns spread the conviction that Tilden was the President -elect. The returns had already settled virtually all the points on which the race was generally expected to hang. The Democrats had easily carried New York and by smaller margins the doubtful states of New Jersey, Connecticut , and Indiana. The Southern states were expected by all save the more hopeful Republicans to line up solidly behind Tilden. All except three of them, Florida, South Carolina, and Louisiana, were reported to have piled up safe Democratic majorities, and the Republican chairmen in Louisiana and Florida were rumored to have conceded those states to their opponents. Even without any votes from the three Southern states, Tilden had 184 electoral votes in the bag, only one short of the 185 required to elect. Hayes was trailing with only 166 electoral votes conceded. In popular votes Tilden, according to official returns later, led his opponent by more than a quarter of a million. In the face of these facts Zachariah Chandler, national Republican chairman, had closed up his New York headquarters and gone home under the belief that his party had gone down in defeat. Morning newspapers across the land, leading Republican journals among them, were rolling off the presses with the story of Tilden’s victory.
Then in the early hours of the next morning William E. Chandler of New Hampshire and John C. Reid, managing editor of the Republican New York Times, awakened Zach Chandler at his hotel and got his permission to wire Republican officials in Florida , Louisiana, and South Carolina, asking if they could hold on to their states for Hayes. The scheme rested upon Republican control of the three state returning boards. If these partisan boards could “canvass” the returns and convert every one of the nineteen electoral votes of the three states into a Hayes vote, the Republican candidate would have exactly 185 votes, a majority of one. Later that day Zach Chandler boldly announced his claim that “Hayes has 185 electoral votes and is elected.”
The audacity of the scheme made success appear improbable at first. But Hewitt, Chandler’s opposite number, took immediate steps to checkmate Republican moves. First he caused committees of prominent Democrats to proceed immediately to the Southern state capitals to watch over party interests in the canvassing of returns. His second move was a flanking maneuver. Although Oregon was clearly a Republican state, one of the party’s electors was a postmaster and therefore as a Federal officeholder disqualified under the Constitution from serving in the electoral college. The Democratic governor of the state promptly appointed an elector of his own party, having the next highest number of votes, to fill the vacancy. Hewitt intended by supporting this move to compel the Republicans in Congress to go behind official state returns in Oregon. In so doing they would pave the way for the Democrats to go behind
the manipulations of the returning boards of Florida, South Carolina, and Louisiana, and undo their work.
In the meanwhile Grant had sent Republican delegations to follow the Democratic observers to the three contested Southern states, and national attention became focused on the deep South. While the situation was different in each state, there were elements common to all of them. First there was the returning board, solidly Republican in each state save Florida, where there was one Democrat to two Republicans . Evidence of the dishonesty and corruptibility of members of these boards, especially that of Louisiana, is still pungent in the musty records of the seventies. Likewise there is ample evidence of irregularities, fraud, intimidation, and violence on the part of both Republicans and Democrats in the elections that the returning boards were to canvass. In some cases there was little to choose between the methods used by the two parties. Meeting in secret sessions and using illegal procedures, the Louisiana returning board threw out some 13,000 Democratic votes and 2000 Republican votes and thereby converted a substantial Tilden majority into a substantial Hayes majority. Three of the five members of the South Carolina board were candidates for office in the election on which they passed judgment. Their canvass gave the state’s Presidential electors to Hayes but the legislature and governorship to Wade Hampton and the Democrats. Flagrantly partisan and arbitrary decisions of the Florida board converted an apparent Tilden majority into Hayes votes.
Speculation on the possible results of a perfectly fair election and a fair canvass of returns in the three states are inconclusive and highly hypothetical. Negro majorities in the population of South Carolina and Louisiana gave the Republicans their strongest claim to those states, though evidence points to a revolt against Carpetbagger control among some Negroes. A white majority and a rift in Republican ranks in Florida are prima facie evidence of the same kind for a Democratic claim to that state. The consensus of recent historical scholarship is that Hayes was probably entitled to the electoral votes of South Carolina and Louisiana, that Tilden was entitled to the four votes of Florida, and that Tilden was therefore elected by a vote of 188 to 181. There has been no tendency to defend the members of the electoral boards or the methods used to influence them. 16
On the appointed day, December 6, the Republican electors of the three states met in their capitals and cast their votes for Hayes and Wheeler, while at the same time electors with certificates from rival Democratic state authorities met and delivered their ballots solidly for Tilden and Hendricks. On the face of state returns, which included one vote of Oregon for Tilden and the nineteen votes of the three contested Southern states for Hayes, the results stood Tilden 185 votes and Hayes 184.
In partisan bitterness and suspicion Congress convened on December 4 and immediately reflected the dangerous cleavage of sentiment in the country. To Democratic shouts of “fraud” and “Tildenor-fight,” the Republicans retorted that they had been robbed of their Negro support by Democratic fraud in all Southern states and would yield no further. While the Democratic opinion among leaders , newspapers, and rank and file appeared to be completely solid in the conviction that the Republicans were out to steal the election and that Tilden’s claim was unassailable, there was less solidarity among Republicans. Such outstanding leaders as President Grant and Senator Roscoe Conkling of New York expressed their belief privately that
Tilden was the victor, and several party journals were wavering or openly doubtful. The great majority of the party, however, was as convinced of Hayes’s claims as the Democrats were of Tilden’s.
The first act of the Democratic majority in the House of Representatives, after organizing and learning the results of the electoral count of December 6, was to appoint committees of investigation and dispatch them to the contested Southern states. The Senate, with a large Republican majority, followed suit by sending its committees southward. This was admittedly temporizing on both sides, for no solution could be expected by this means.
The fact was nobody could suggest an acceptable solution to the problem that was now the critical one — the question of how to count the electoral votes. Neither the Constitution, nor the law and rules, nor precedent and custom offered an acceptable solution. The Twelfth Amendment to the Constitution declared that “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.” But it did not say who should do the counting. If it would be done by the temporary president of the Senate, Thomas W. Ferry, as the Republicans contended, the result would obviously be a Hayes victory. If by the two houses acting jointly the count would go in favor of Tilden. Since neither candidate had a clear majority, Democrats demanded that the election be thrown into the House, as provided in another clause of the Twelfth Amendment. Republicans refused to consider this solution because of the Democratic control of the House. There were other disturbing questions to which the law gave no clear and unequivocal answer. Could Congress go behind the official state returns and inquire into fraud ? Or must these returns be accepted on their face? Reversing positions in the old state- rights dialogue, the Republicans solemnly demanded respect for state authority and the Democrats brushed it aside. Again, if no President were elected by March 4, who would succeed to power? And back of these questions the darker one — if it came to an appeal to force, where did the advantage lie? The Republicans had the regular army, but it was small and widely dispersed. On the other side were the Democratic governors in command of the National Guard.
The year drew toward its close with no prospect of a break in the deadlock between the two Houses and the two parties. On December 13 both Hewitt and Chandler announced equally firm claims to the Presidency for their candidates. Debates became angrier on Capitol Hill and members began to arm themselves . Scenes on the floors of the two Houses reminded old-timers of the days of 1860–1861. It had been less than twelve years since the country was at war and memories of those days were always present in this crisis.
1 Allan Nevins (ed.), Selected Writings of Abram S. Hewitt (New York, 1937), 156– 194.
2 Milton H. Northrup, “A Grave Crisis in American History, The Inner History of the Origins and Formation of the Electoral Commission of 1877,” Century Magazine, LXII (1901), 923– 934.
3 Henry Watterson, “The Hayes-Tilden Contest for the
