Chapter 13
Amid the growing and diversifying stream of immigration to America, the least noticed tributary was the one that had long been the largest and still flowed strong: from Britain. British immigrants assimilated easily into American life, arriving with the language and, for the most part, the Protestant religion of the American majority. At a time when the mass of immigrants seemed increasingly foreign to many of the native born, the British were gratifyingly familiar. Once judged the agents of perfidious Albion, the British were suddenly the model of what immigrants should be and do.
From the perspective of the British immigrants themselves, the adjustment to American life was indeed generally straightforward. They found work and homes; they settled in among their new neighbors more or less where they chose. Yet certain aspects of American culture required getting used to, even after some years in the States.
John Lewis had arrived from England before the Civil War. He took up residence in New York City and landed a job in a wholesale grocery. He applauded the Union victory although he didn’t fight, and he broadly supported the principles of Republican Reconstruction although he wasn’t especially active in politics. He was more interested in American folkways, which never failed to intrigue him, and in occasional letters to a brother back in England he described what he encountered.
“I went to Philadelphia on Xmas eve and stayed three days and was pressed to stay the week out,” he explained at the beginning of 1876. “There was nothing special then but feasting—and I did feast, had to doctor myself when I came home.” One aspect of the holiday celebration, besides the feasting, did merit special notice. “That is the Christmas trees, originally from Germany and I think first introduced into England by Prince Albert, but an old custom here. Usually the trees are decorated and loaded with sweets, toys &c, which are disposed of with great eclat (what’s that, Willie?) and the matter ends.” (Willie was Lewis’s nephew.) “Not so in Philadelphia. There all the people seem to resolve themselves into children for the occasion.” Philadelphians carried the decoration of Christmas trees to excess. Everyone who could afford it—and to Lewis’s eye, nearly everyone could—devoted two whole rooms of their houses to Christmas trees and collateral decorations. “The usual arrangement in this country is to have two parlours—be it a large or small house—opening to each other by sliding doors, the front being for state occasions. As large and fine a tree as can be accommodated being procured and set up, it is covered with every conceivable shape into which coloured and gilt paper and card can be cut, and … little pictures, glass balls, chains, garlands &c, anything to make a gay and imposing display.… All the light possible is thrown upon it, often by reflectors, the lattice blinds thrown open, and it is open to inspection by passers by, which, as houses in Philadelphia are only a little above the street, is an easy matter.” There was no limit, beyond the budget and imagination of the homeowners, to the extent of the decorations. “At one place I visited, an old doctor’s, there was a very handsome river steamboat, perfect, three feet long with about fifty passengers (these last small pictures cut out) all of white, coloured and gilt card. Also a beautiful fire hose carriage.”
After the trees were fully adorned, a procession began. “People go round with or without their children to see them, and frequently knock at the door to be admitted to a closer inspection, which is readily granted. I heard of one house where 75 were admitted in about two hours. Riding through the better class streets on the cars”—the horse-drawn trolleys—“the effect is novel and very fine.” Lewis noted that though the decorations and ornaments often featured the names of the children of the households, the whole business was directed by the adults. “It appears to be got up more for the gratification of the older than the young ones.” The youngsters preferred candy, to which the Americans were addicted. “The candy stores are among the gayest and most prosperous, and the consumption of their wares by women and children all the year round is enormous and is often spoken of by writers as a great national failing. If a woman goes out she must not forget a pound or at least half a pound of candy for baby—and herself.”1
In an ordinary year the holiday season would have wound down after New Year’s Day, but 1876 was no ordinary year, being the centennial of American independence. Philadelphia would lead the festivities, as the nation’s birthplace and still its second-largest city. Lewis had to work in New York the week after Christmas, but on New Year’s Eve he closed the shop and boarded an afternoon train back to Philadelphia. He met his son there, and together they went to a friend’s house. The principal entertainment of the evening was an elaborate spoof on lawyers and judges. “The host in wig and gown (also specs) was mounted on a well constructed ‘bench’ and was engaged in trying a disreputable looking ‘blaggard’ ”—blackguard—“Mr. Terence O’Sullivan (my son), for jilting a very prim old maid, and as nearly all the audience were called as witnesses the fun was uproarious. The prosecuting lawyer did not amount to much, but defendant’s counsel John Moffitt, assistant clerk and a prospective relative, was a hit in his examining of the witnesses, especially when Mrs. Bridget O’Halloran, the widdy”—widow—“of a husband, was called as an expert in matrimonial matters. I never enjoyed anything so much before. The trial lasted nearly three hours, concluding with an elaborate address for the defense, counsel quoting from decisions in Buckwheat versus Muffins and other celebrated cases in support of his argument.” After the prisoner was found guilty and the judge ordered “some ridiculous sentence which I forget,” the entire court adjourned. “We then went down stairs to refresh on great moulds of ice cream of several flavours, jellies, cakes, and fruits of various kinds &c &c.”
At the stroke of midnight the city erupted in what Lewis called “the most extraordinary noise ever heard. It had been arranged that at that hour every bell, whistle, or other instrument that would make a noise should be put into requisition. Philadelphia is a great railroad place and has many thousands of workshops—also churches.” Everything heralded the centennial year. “The effect was wonderful, not loud, being scattered—rather melancholy, seeming as if some terrible disaster was occurring, such as the sacking of a great city, and the sound of a vast multitude wailing and shrieking at a distance.”
The celebration continued for Lewis that night till half past three and resumed the following day for another banquet, featuring “two turkeys, at least twenty-pounders, with all the trimmings.” The party segregated after dinner. “Gentlemen upstairs, ladies to the parlour. We smoked and played cards, but hearing a great row downstairs I left as soon as I could, went down, and found that I had missed part of the fun—charades and other games. After that we had nigger minstrelsy &c by my son, Moffitt, and another young man in black faces and appropriate costumes. Black Sal also appeared and danced a jig; she puzzled me, but I afterwards learnt that she was the doctor’s wife next door, a romp—nearer fifty than any other age.… After that we had a variety of choruses and some good piano playing. Nobody waited to be asked to sing.”2
THE NEXT DAY was Sunday and Lewis stayed over. But he had to return to New York to open the store on Monday. He didn’t get back to Philadelphia till August, by which time the Centennial Exposition—commonly called “the Centennial”—had established itself as what Lewis called “the great event of the year if not of the Century.” The grounds of the exposition at Fairmount Park were packed with the high and the humble; the former included, on Lewis’s first day, the governors of several American states and Dom Pedro, the emperor of Brazil. The entrance fee was fifty cents; additional fees—“some of them pretty stiff”—were charged at exhibits inside the gates. The different sections of the country and diverse parts of the world were on display. “A great feature of the grounds were the ‘state’ houses. These were of various sizes, and some of them curiosities in style and ornament, but all built with the same object, to be a sort of headquarters to the people from the various states of the Union, mostly with handsome parlours, piano &c, and where they could register their names, meet friends or receive letters.” The western states particularly strove to make a favorable impression. Kansas and Colorado joined forces to display “wonderful specimens of minerals and agricultural produce, corn twenty feet high, wheat and other grains of a wonderful growth. But the principal attraction was a collection of wild animals arranged on rocks, from the buffalo down to prairie dogs &c—all or nearly all the wild animals found in those states and all shot by a little woman, a Mrs. Maxwell who attended a photograph stand selling pictures of herself and animals.”
As a native of England, Lewis took special interest in observing the customs of New England. “I may explain,” he told his brother, “that by ‘New England’ is meant the present states of Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut, the real and only Yankee land, peopled from the colony of ‘pilgrims’ who landed in 1620.” The centerpiece of the New England exhibit was “an old ‘New England’ log house with inmates to match—all old—and mostly historical furniture—veritable old spinning wheels at work and numberless old nic-nacs, real affair—also the cradle that Peregrine White was rocked in—the first white child born in ‘New England.’ … In the kitchen a crowd was feasting (at fifty cents a head) on real Yankee pork and beans (you ought to try them).”
Near the New England house stood “the Japanese bazaar, curiously built, and a little garden with Japanese plants … surrounded by a very neat bamboo fence, all very ingeniously made. There was also several of those dwarf trees that you may have read about—fifty or one hundred or more years old. Oaks and others, little, crooked, gnarled and yet all healthy, and mostly about eighteen to twenty-four inches each way. In the bazaar, natives in our clothes were busy selling all kinds of small wares at good prices. They have a residence on the ground—a large house of wood, all brought from Japan, and whilst it was being erected they were the centre of attraction, from their excellent work and curious tools.”
The smaller Turkish pavilion also housed a bazaar, or souvenir shop. “But the pavilion is mostly used as a smoking saloon, and it was an amusing sight to see it full of fellows, mostly young, either smoking the long flexible tubed water pipes, or the long chiboucks, both fifteen cents, five feet long, and which they did not know how to handle, and trying to make believe that they were enjoying themselves, while Turkish waiters in costume were bringing eastern drinks (fifteen cents) and poking up the pipes.” Next to the smoking saloon was another Ottoman curiosity: “a small Jerusalem tent, with olive wood work, all Catholic beads, crosses &c &c sold by sons of the prophet.”
Though the American past had inspired the Centennial, the American future provided its theme. Machinery large and small revealed the power of industry to transform ordinary lives in extraordinary ways. Lewis was unimpressed by what was supposed to be the centerpiece of the industrial exhibits: a Corliss steam engine. “That’s a fraud,” he told his brother. “There are plenty of larger engines than that. It is imposing on account of its position and its having double beams and a large fly wheel. This last is certainly all that is said of it, being I think of 70 tons (our ton is 2000 lbs.).” Yet though the main attraction disappointed Lewis, the auxiliary exhibits delighted him. “If you can think of any kind of machine for any purpose, it was pretty sure to be there and numbers of them at work. I saw one large machine making paper, and another printing wall paper. Curious—just as easy to print in twenty colours as in one.” Steam-driven fans like those employed in the mining industry to ventilate shafts made cyclones of the warm summer air. “The force of their wind was tremendous, and hats &c were in danger anywhere near them.” While steam multiplied force, electricity conquered distance. “The ‘London Graphic’ was printed here, and so was the ‘New York Times.’ For the latter electrotype plates left here”—Lewis was writing from his home in New York—“at 4 a.m., and papers were ready when the doors opened at 8. An eight page paper.” The importance of newspapers to Americans could not be overstated. A newspaper advertising agency—“This is a large business here”—had built a house where visitors could relax and catch up on the news. “In this house was a reading room, free, and any paper asked for was brought by attendants. There is probably 20,000 papers published in the U.S.”
The fair included a “Women’s Hall” displaying the products of women’s work from America and around the world. “This is a failure,” Lewis wrote, at least as it regarded America. “By far the most valuable and interesting of women’s work is principally shown in Machinery Hall and in the Main Hall, for instance in watch-making, for which there are several large factories in this country, where every part, even the most delicate, are made by fine machines, mostly attended by girls, and turning out beautiful work.”
American ingenuity had been applied to creature comforts as well. Lewis and other visitors appreciated ice water that gushed from a fountain and piqued his curiosity even as it quenched his thirst. “I could not make it out where it came from with so much force,” Lewis said, “but next day I came there just as they were filling the tank with ice. In the ground, where the iron pipe from the water works came, there was sunk a giant iron tank which held several tons of ice (I saw five or six go in). The water pipe ran into this and from another side a pipe led to the fountain. The ice being all in, the air tight cover was put on, and the stopcock being turned, the full force of water passed through the ice to the fountain.” In case his brother wondered why the Americans went to all that bother, Lewis added, “Ice water is a very important and necessary article during the hot weather, and was in fair supply in all parts of the grounds.” Yet many visitors preferred other drinks. “The numerous soda water stands in all the buildings did a roaring trade, and so did the German ‘lager bier’ sellers. Lager bier is German, a pleasant refreshing real beer, but it is still an unsettled question whether or not it will intoxicate. Plenty of Germans can be found who would swear to drinking all the way up to 50 or 60 glasses a day—five cents a glass. Of late years, Americans are large consumers.”
Power of another sort formed a conspicuous part of the display. The Krupp works of Germany had sent one of its great guns, an artillery piece with a long barrel—“mounted like a monster telescope, wrong end up,” it seemed to Lewis—and a rifled bore. Less sophisticated but larger were the American weapons: “all sorts of guns of all sizes up to the twenty-inch ‘Dahlgren’ with a heap of its 1080 lb. shot. Also a monitor turret, with two fifteen-inch guns mounted, but I cannot conceive how they can work in so small a space.” Inside the federal government’s building was “every conceivable instrument for scientific murder: fire arms, old and new; shot and shell, whole and sawed in two to show the interior; edged weapons; pikes; torpedoes; models of vessels and other things; cordage; figures with all kinds of uniforms from 1800 to the present time.” The signal corps contributed its latest lighthouse apparatus. “I had often wished to see a Fresnel lens and could never understand why they should be so complicated and expensive. But I can see it now. The lens is a great lantern (of course this goes inside the real lantern) which a man can—and has to—climb into, composed of a very great number of prisms of various sizes and curves of the finest glass and very heavy, and when the light is burning must multiply it many hundred times.” The military exhibit also included “what I had hitherto thought a myth—the stump of a tree about five feet high and fifteen to eighteen inches thick that had been cut off by musket balls, at (I think) the battle of the Wilderness. This is authentic.”3
THE CENTENNIAL YEAR was also a presidential election year, which added to the excitement. The election of 1868 had been a snooze, and that of 1872, when Ulysses Grant easily defeated Horace Greeley, still more somnolent. The Democratic victories in the congressional races in 1874 promised that 1876 would be the most competitive presidential contest since the war and challenged the Republicans to find a worthy candidate to succeed Grant.
Few initially suspected that the candidate would be Rutherford Hayes, and those few didn’t include Hayes himself. “We are living happily—never more so,” the Ohio governor wrote in his diary in March 1875. “Lucy is healthy, and as she grows older preserves her beauty. She is large but not unwieldy.”4
Hayes had never expected to get as far in life as he had. His father died before he was born, and he entered the world so frail his mother braced for his early death. When he survived infancy, she clung to him tightly, the more so after his brother drowned ice-skating. She schooled him at home before sending him to a private academy; even after he attended college (Kenyon) and law school (Harvard), she kept close watch over him. With much of his generation he contracted the fever of Manifest Destiny and in 1847 attempted to enlist in the army that was invading Mexico. But his mother arranged for the local doctor to find that the young man’s health couldn’t stand the rigors of the campaign, and he was rejected.
In 1860 he was a lukewarm Unionist. “Let them go,” he said of the seceding states. Yet the attack on Fort Sumter rekindled his patriotism, and he took a commission in Ohio’s volunteers. He served with distinction, receiving four wounds and the grateful respect of his comrades and neighbors, who elected him to Congress and three times to the governorship of Ohio. The last time—in 1875—he won impressively enough that many Republicans looked to him to succeed that other Ohioan, Grant, in the White House.5
There was some question whether Grant wanted to be succeeded. No president had served three terms, although the Constitution didn’t forbid it. After his thumping victory over Greeley in 1872, Grant thought he might be the one to break the tacit embargo. He and his wife, Julia, liked living in the White House, and he had no particular prospects after leaving office and no pension. Besides, he hated the thought of departing under the cloud of scandal. But precisely that cloud caused the Republican professionals to push him to the door.
The identity of his replacement evoked no such agreement. Benjamin Bristow believed the scandals favored the fearless sweeper of the Augean stables, namely him. But others argued that a Bristow nomination would play directly to the Democrats’ strength: voters’ distaste at what passed for politics as usual. Besides, Grant couldn’t stand Bristow, and the president retained enough support among the party faithful to derail the Kentuckian’s candidacy.
The mantle of favorite fell on James G. Blaine. Elected to Congress from Maine in 1862, Blaine had quickly earned a reputation for eloquence and charm. Some elder statesmen of the House compared him favorably with the young Henry Clay. Like Clay, he was elevated to speaker while still junior by years, and he deftly managed the affairs of the House. He spoke with a voice of moderate reason during Reconstruction and aided in efforts to bring the South back into the Union without excessive recrimination. Yet he drew the line where amnesty met amnesia. In January 1876, in the spirit of centennial reconciliation, House Democrats sponsored a bill to waive the civil disabilities imposed on Confederate office-holders by the Fourteenth Amendment; Blaine accepted the principle but offered a single amendment: that the waiver not include Jefferson Davis. Blaine’s amendment itself spoiled the centennial spirit; his explanation drove the wedge deeper.
I do not place his exclusion on the ground that Mr. Davis was, as he has been commonly called, the head and front of the Rebellion.… Mr. Davis was in that respect as guilty, no more so, no less so, than thousands of others who have already received the benefit and grace of amnesty.… It is not because of any particular and special damage that he above others did to the Union, or because he was personally or especially of consequence, that I except him.… I except him on this ground: that he was the author, knowingly, deliberately, guiltily, and willfully, of the gigantic murders and crimes at Andersonville.
Blaine recounted the horrors of the Confederate prison camp—of the Union soldiers starved, sickened, and beaten, and tracked and mauled by hounds when they tried to escape.
It is often said that we shall lift Mr. Davis again into great consequence by refusing him amnesty. This is not for me to consider. I only see before me, when his name is presented, a man who, by a wave of his hand, by a nod of his head, could have put an end to the atrocious cruelties at Andersonville. Some of us had kinsmen there, most of us had friends there, all of us had countrymen there. In the name of those kinsmen, friends, and countrymen, I here protest, and shall with my vote protest, against calling back and crowning with the honors of full American citizenship the man who organized that murder.
Blaine’s amendment sparked an uproar in the House that lasted days. The entire country followed the controversy and noted the man who started it. As Blaine had hoped, the furor made him a leading candidate for the Republican nomination.
But to gain the prize Blaine had to get past Roscoe Conkling, the formidable leader of New York’s Republican delegation in Congress. “He was of commanding, even magnificent presence,” a contemporary wrote of Conkling, “six feet three inches tall, with regular features, lofty forehead, and piercing eyes—blond and gigantic as a viking.” At a moment when the scandals in the Grant administration provoked soul-searching among some Republicans, Conkling was an unapologetic partisan. “I do not know how to belong to a party a little,” he said. From his seat in the Senate he hurled imprecations at any who deserted the party in the name of reform. “Who are these oracular censors so busy of late in brandishing the rod over me and every other Republican?” he hissed. “Who are these men who, in newspapers and elsewhere, are cracking their whips over Republicans and playing schoolmaster to the Republican party and its conscience and convictions?” Answering his own question, he identified them as “the man milliners”—the homosexuals—“the dilettanti and carpet knights of politics.… Their stock in trade is rancid, canting self-righteousness. They are wolves in sheep’s clothing. Their real object is office and plunder. When Dr. Johnson defined patriotism as the last refuge of a scoundrel, he was unconscious of the then undeveloped capabilities and uses of the word ‘reform’!”6
Conkling didn’t confine his hostility to reformers; he hated James Blaine with an equal passion. The bad blood dated to a moment in the House when Blaine was speaking on a measure Blaine supported and Conkling opposed; Conkling conspicuously yawned and announced, “If the member from Maine had the least idea how profoundly indifferent I am to his opinion … I think he would hardly have troubled to rise here and express his opinion.” He then turned his back on Blaine and took up some correspondence. Blaine answered in a diffident tone that grew more assertive as its sarcasm became evident. “The contempt of that large-minded gentleman is so wilting, his haughty disdain, his grandiloquent swell, his majestic, super-eminent, turkey-gobbler strut has been so crushing to myself and all the members of the House, that I know it was an act of greatest temerity for me to venture upon a controversy with him.” Citing an article in one of the New York newspapers likening Conkling to another dandy, Blaine declared that Conkling had taken the comparison seriously. “It has given his strut additional pomposity. The resemblance is great. It is striking. Hyperion to a satyr, Thersites to Hercules, mud to marble, dunghill to diamond, a singed cat to a Bengal tiger, a whining puppy to a roaring lion.”7
Conkling never forgave the insult, and no sooner had Blaine’s star begun to rise over the Capitol on its way toward the 1876 nomination than Conkling engineered an intercept. His allies reiterated Blaine’s role in the Crédit Mobilier scandal, and they related new tales of impropriety. Blaine was said to have received a loan of $64,000 from the Union Pacific that he never repaid, to have been given bonds by the Little Rock & Fort Smith Railroad in exchange for political favors, and to have traded influence for cash with the Northern Pacific.
Blaine responded with righteous indignation to the charges. He denied them point by point, to the satisfaction of many impartial auditors. A congressional committee summoned to investigate the general question of influence peddling declined to include Blaine on its list of targets. But then a man named James Mulligan stepped forward with some letters by Blaine regarding the Little Rock & Fort Smith. Blaine was attending the hearing; as soon as he heard Mulligan mention the letters he signaled to an ally on the committee to move an adjournment. The ally announced that he was sick and requested to have the session suspended; the chairman granted the request.
That afternoon Blaine went to Mulligan’s hotel. According to Mulligan, Blaine begged for the letters. “He prayed, almost went on his knees—I would say on his knees—and implored me to think of his six children and his wife, that if the committee should get hold of this communication, it would sink him immediately and ruin him forever.” When this appeal to sympathy failed, Blaine tried cupidity. He “asked me if I would not like a consulship,” Mulligan said. This too failed, but Mulligan consented to let Blaine examine the letters on his promise to return them.
Blaine contested Mulligan’s account of their meeting, starting with the lament about being ruined, continuing with the offer of a consulship, and concluding with the promise to return the letters. Nor did he, in fact, return them. Instead he rose before the full House and dramatically drew the letters from the breast pocket of his coat. “I am not afraid to show the letters,” he declaimed. “Thank God Almighty! I am not afraid to show them. There they are. There is the very original package.” He proceeded to read the letters, although not every one completely, as they were too many and too long. The theatricality of the performance was obvious to all, but this hardly diminished its effect.
Blaine had the galleries hanging on his words when he threw a surprise at the Democratic chairman of the committee. An informant had told him that the chairman had received a telegram, from a person well placed to know, that Blaine was innocent of the charges against him. The chairman hadn’t revealed the telegram; he said later that he first wanted to authenticate it. But Blaine forced him to admit that he was holding exculpatory evidence. “You got a dispatch last Thursday morning … completely and absolutely exonerating me from this charge, and you have suppressed it!”
The galleries erupted and the members began shouting. The House speaker gaveled for order and threatened to toss the visitors out. The members ignored the gavel and the sergeants said they lacked the muscle to remove the guests. Blaine accepted the handshakes and backslaps of his colleagues.
But the bravura performance merely reinforced the belief among Blaine skeptics that he was too clever and smooth to be completely honest. As the spell he had conjured in the House diminished and members asked to see the letters for themselves, they discovered how artfully he had excerpted them. No single phrase did Blaine more damage than an underlined postscript to one of the messages: “Burn this letter.”8
Blaine and his supporters struggled to regain momentum. At the Republican convention in the summer of 1876, Robert Ingersoll placed Blaine’s name before the gathering with a speech that supplied a label to its subject. “Like an armed warrior, like a plumed knight,” Ingersoll said, recalling Blaine’s speech against Jefferson Davis, “James G. Blaine marched down the halls of the American Congress and threw his shining lance full and fair against the brazen forehead of every traitor to his country.”9
Blaine’s backers roared approval; briefly it appeared the “Plumed Knight” would carry the convention by storm. But the Conkling faction chanted, “Burn this letter,” and the delirium dissipated. No alternative candidate emerged through several ballots, till someone suggested Rutherford Hayes as a compromise all could get behind. A few did so with enthusiasm, others with the attitude archly expressed by Henry Adams, who called Hayes “a third-rate nonentity, whose only recommendation is that he is obnoxious to no one.” Yet under the circumstances, this was no mean recommendation, and as the convention prepared to ballot for a seventh time, on Friday, June 16, Hayes was hopeful. “Friday has been a lucky day for me before!” he wrote. When his hopes proved out, the experience was more than he had anticipated. “It for a few moments quite unmanned me.”10
SAMUEL TILDEN RECEIVED the Democratic nomination with greater composure. Having parlayed his prosecution of William Tweed into election as New York governor, Tilden soon became a contender for the presidency. The Republican scandals provided an opening for a Democrat with clean hands, and none were conspicuously cleaner than Tilden’s.
Tilden’s immaculacy reflected his eschewing not simply the sins of ordinary people but most ordinary people themselves. “He is the supreme illustration in American political history of sheer intellect unrelieved by any of those human qualities which win men’s love,” New Yorker Harry Peck observed. Tilden’s father had run the post office in New Lebanon, New York, where the local philosophers debated the issues of the day. Tilden, a sickly child, listened and came to identify more closely with adults than with his peers. His aloofness served him well during the Civil War, when he kept his distance from both Union Republicans and antiwar Democrats, and afterward, when as a corporate lawyer he earned a reputation as “the Great Forecloser.” He was cold to his clerks; to one who inquired about vacation he responded, “Your vacation will begin at once and continue indefinitely.” Many of his contemporaries underestimated him. Tweed called him the hero of “the cheese press and hay loft democracy” of upstate New York. Yet Harry Peck saw shrewdness in Tilden’s quiet method. “Both in law and politics he brought to bear all the resources of a cold, calculating nature, unmoved by passion or by prejudice, able to bide its time, to temporize, to dissemble, and to scheme, not merely for the present but for the distant future.” He made a fortune in law and lived in silent elegance.11
And when the Democrats needed a candidate in 1876 they looked his way. Tilden efficiently mounted a publicity campaign in the months before the Democratic convention, reminding voters in critical states of his success snaring Tweed and of his eagerness to do likewise to the scandal-plagued, Republican-appointed federal workforce. His organization hosted distinguished Democrats from around the country, courting Southerners especially. “Never a leading Southern man came to town who was not seen,” Henry Watterson, the editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal, recalled. “If of enough importance he was taken to No. 15 Gramercy Park”—Tilden’s house. “Mr. Tilden measured to the Southern standard of the gentleman in politics.”
At the convention Tilden’s nominator struck the keynote of the campaign. “The great issue upon which this election will be lost or won is the question of needed administrative reform,” Senator Francis Kernan of New York asserted. “If we have a man who has laid his hand on dishonest officials, rooted out abuses, lowered taxes, and inaugurated reforms, and if we are wise enough to select him as our leader, we will sweep the Union.” In their wisdom the delegates chose Tilden, on the second ballot.12
THE GENERAL CAMPAIGN reflected the subdued personalities of the candidates. Republican voters were urged to “vote as they shot”; Democrats called for the kind of reform only a change of party in the White House could accomplish. But the Republican entreaties lacked the fire of years past, and the Democratic demands were widely interpreted as being synonymous with “our turn.” Journalists lamented that there was little to cover. “A flat and tame campaign,” the New York Herald called it.13
The central question of the campaign was not what the candidates stood for but who would count the votes. Charges of theft and fraud weren’t uncommon in the history of American presidential elections; nearly every close contest had elicited complaints from the losers. But manipulation of the vote was particularly tempting in 1876 on account of continuing disputes regarding governance in the three states of South Carolina, Louisiana, and Florida. The Democrats expected to carry the Southern states where their party had regained local control; they might well win fairly, so despised were the Republicans by nearly all whites, but they would certainly win unfairly, by suppressing the African American vote. The Republicans reckoned that memories of the war would work in Hayes’s favor in most Northern states, although they couldn’t count on New York, Tilden’s home. By both sides’ estimate, the race would be close, and the three Southern states where Republicans still held control in the waning days of Reconstruction could easily provide the winning margin.
This was just how the election played out. The turnout was huge; eight and a half million voters trooped to the polls, two million more than in 1872. Tilden led in the popular vote and, in the North alone, carried New York, New Jersey, Indiana, and Connecticut. If he held all or nearly all the South, as both sides expected, he would triumph comfortably. He and Hayes both went to bed on election night thinking Tilden had won.
Most newspapers thought so, too. “Tilden Is Elected,” Charles Dana’s Democratic New York Sun declared happily on the Wednesday after the election. The Republican Chicago Tribune lamented, “Lost. The Country Given Over to Democratic Greed and Plunder.”
Yet the vote wasn’t quite final. Tilden’s electoral total stood at 184, one shy of the 185 needed for victory. Hayes had 166. The nineteen votes unaccounted for belonged to the three anomalous Southern states. (A separate, technical dispute arose over one electoral vote from Oregon; this was resolved in Hayes’s favor.) Although Hayes was ready to concede—as late as the following Saturday he wrote in his diary, “The election has resulted in the defeat of the Republicans”—his managers were not. They sent urgent telegrams to Republicans in South Carolina, Louisiana, and Florida: “Hold your state.” Meanwhile the chairman of the Republican national committee, Senator Zachariah Chandler of Michigan, brazenly claimed the nineteen votes for his man. “Hayes has 185 electoral votes and is elected,” Chandler told the press.
As the Republicans dug in their heels, Tilden’s momentum toward the White House diminished and then disappeared. Democrats in the three states swore that Tilden had received solid majorities of the votes cast, which was probably true. Republicans in those states countered that the Democrats had prevented thousands of black Republicans from voting, which was also true. “They have killed colored men in every precinct,” a black South Carolinian explained.14
With the contradictory confidence of their mutually exclusive convictions, the two sides pushed the fight forward. The Republicans and the Democrats each sent teams of lawyers and politicians to assess matters on the disputed ground; predictably the teams returned conflicting reports. The Twelfth Amendment empowered Congress (somewhat confusingly) to count the electoral votes, but because Congress was split, with the Democrats controlling the House and the Republicans the Senate, the issue was left unresolved. The best the lawmakers could manage was to appoint a special commission, comprising five Republican legislators, five Democratic legislators, and five members of the Supreme Court. The judges were presumed to be less partisan than the elected politicians, but just in case they weren’t, they too were apportioned by party, with two being Republicans, two Democrats, and the fifth to be chosen by the other four. By understanding, the fifth judge would be Associate Justice David Davis of Illinois, who belonged to neither party (having been appointed by Abraham Lincoln in 1862 on precisely that account). But Davis, in a career move, accepted election to the Senate by the Illinois legislature and vacated his seat on the electoral commission. The other Supreme Court justices all had party affiliations, but lest the election never be decided, the Democrats acquiesced to the appointment of Republican justice Joseph P. Bradley.
Some Democrats soon regretted their complaisance. The electoral commission ruled on point after point of the dispute and in a series of eight-to-seven decisions awarded the contested electors to Hayes. According to the commission, Hayes won by a single vote, 185 to 184.
Yet the commission’s finding was only advisory; Congress had to accept or reject it. The Republican Senate naturally accepted; the Democratic House stalled. Most Democrats recognized they couldn’t keep Hayes from the White House forever without risking an ugly backlash, but they hoped to get something in exchange for letting him in. “I could appoint a Southern Democrat to the Cabinet,” Hayes mused in his diary, and perhaps let the musing slip. More to the point, he made clear his desire for sectional reconciliation. The war was over; the South should be allowed to manage its own affairs. Individuals purporting to speak for Hayes promised he would withdraw the last of the federal troops from the political affairs of the South—meaning, at this juncture, South Carolina and Louisiana—and the candidate didn’t contradict them.
The House convened on Thursday, March 1, only seventy-two hours before the scheduled inauguration, to decide the election at last. The session ran past midnight, but by dawn Hayes was indubitably the winner.
Some Democrats remained unreconciled. “Today is Friday,” Joseph Blackburn of Kentucky observed. “Upon that day, the savior of the world suffered crucifixion between two thieves. On this Friday constitutional government, justice, honesty, fair dealing, manhood, and decency suffer crucifixion amid a number of thieves.” Yet others, weighing the risks of a continued contest, deemed the bargain acceptable. “I prefer four years of Hayes’ administration to four years of civil war,” said Abram Hewitt, chairman of the Democratic national committee.
Tilden himself was philosophical about what came to be called the Compromise of 1877. “I can retire to private life,” he said, “with the consciousness that I shall receive from posterity the credit of having been elected to the highest position in the gift of the people without any of the cares and responsibilities of the office.”15