The More Things Change

A new history of the disputed election of 1876

By One Vote: The Disputed Presidential Election of 1876
by Michael F. Holt, University Press of Kansas, 2008, $34.95, 300 pg.
Rutherford Hayes, the nineteenth president of the United States, is best remembered for the unusual circumstances of his election. The election of 1876, in which Hayes campaigned against Democrat Samuel Tilden, was extremely close; fraud and voter intimidation in three Southern states put the election’s outcome in doubt.In a foreshadowing of the 2000 presidential election, the Democrat won the popular vote, as lawyers descended on Florida and Supreme Court justices swung the election to the Republican. Michael Holt’s By One Vote is an in-depth history of the 1876 election and the political atmosphere of the age. The author, a University of Virginia professor, invites readers to look back to a time at which American politics was a corrupt, machine-driven beast.
Hayes vs. Tilden
The government and the nature of political campaigns in the America of the 1870s resembled those of a Third World kleptocracy. While Holt’s narrative is sometimes bogged down in painful descriptions of obscure state elections and endless conventions, his vivid descriptions of endemic sleaze bring the minions of Tammany Hall to life. The Grant administration was infested with scandal and bribe-taking. Favor-seekers regularly passed money along to civil servants and elected officials. Though both Hayes and Tilden vaguely espoused “reform,” neither campaign offered tangible plans to fight corruption. Ballot boxes were brazenly stuffed on Election Day. (One county in South Carolina reported more votes than there were registered voters.)
Worse, Southern blacks were the victims of brutal voter intimidation at polling places. Here, Holt debunks the myth that the 1876 race was stolen from Tilden. It seems that if the votes had been properly counted, Tilden would have won. But if blacks had been able to vote freely, Hayes would have emerged as the victor. The reality is that both candidates, like most politicians of the day, were the beneficiaries of unethical campaign tactics.
Despite politics today being significantly cleaner and more transparent than in 1876, it would be premature for Americans to engage in self-congratulation. Readers will be amazed at how little progress has been made since Hayes’ day in curbing hyper-partisanship.
Both candidates’ surrogates dished out attacks that were nasty, petty, and false. A Republican newspaper editor wrote that Samuel Tilden was a “prim, little, withered-up, fidgety old bachelor…who never had a genuine impulse for man nor any affection for woman….” Tilden would not be the last Democrat slandered as a girly-man, as Michael Dukakis and John Kerry would later discover. “Waving the bloody shirt,” or slamming Democrats as ex-Confederates, was a favorite Republican campaign tactic. It was often effective since the Democratic Party’s strongest support was in the South. In a precursor to Democrats being labeled soft on communism and terrorism, Republicans intoned: “Not all Democrats were rebels, but every rebel was a Democrat.”
Tilden’s supporters were equally harsh in their rhetoric; the Maine Democratic platform argued that “There can be no reasonable hope of reform…under a Republican administration controlled by a ring of officeholders who are eating out the substance of the people to enrich themselves and their servile retainers.” Considering the long history of negative campaigning, By One Vote makes the reader skeptical that the rancor will somehow cease with Barack Obama in office.
…The More They Stay the Same
When Election Day came and went without a winner, the nation descended into constitutional crisis. Two sets of returns were tabulated in Louisiana, South Carolina, and Florida—one with Tilden winning, the other giving the presidency to Hayes. Since the Constitution does not contain provisions for arbitrating disputed elections, Congress formed an ad hoc committee of representatives, senators, and Supreme Court justices to decide which tally to accept. When the one independent justice resigned from the committee, a Republican replaced him. Predictably, the committee voted to accept the Republican returns, making Hayes president.
Unfortunately, the lessons of 1876 were quickly forgotten. Congress did not standardize state election procedures or take steps to fairly adjudicate close elections. Americans paid the price in 2000 with an eerily similar disputed election. Though real progress has been made since then, the possibility remains of another election thrown askew by butterfly ballots or hanging chads. This is the message that readers should take away from By One Vote; the history described in its pages is too disheartening for Americans to be condemned to repeat it.