by Ron Chernow
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ON ELECTION DAY 1876, Western Union hooked up a telegraph to bring presidential results directly to the White House. Tilden decisively swept the popular vote with a quarter-million margin, but with 184 electoral votes, fell one short of the 185 required for victory. Nonetheless, as Grant gathered with Republican leaders, the prevailing sense was that Tilden had won and the White House mood darkened accordingly. “Sherman, with his usual impetuosity, was pacing the room,” recalled John Eaton, “lamenting with some profanity the fate of the Nation—and especially of the army—should the Democrats . . . assume control, but Grant was perfectly calm and apparently serene.”25
Slowly the extraordinary prospect dawned that Hayes, who could claim with certainty only 166 electoral votes, might pull off an upset victory. Disputed results in the three “unredeemed” southern states—Louisiana, Florida, and South Carolina—could, if all resolved in his favor, provide him with 19 votes, tipping him over the edge to a one-vote victory with 185 votes. The stage was now set for an electoral deadlock and an explosive constitutional crisis.
The day after the election, Grant traveled to Philadelphia for the closing ceremonies of the Centennial Exhibition. He stayed at the residence of George Childs, where Republican bigwigs pored over returns that documented the most closely contested presidential race in American history. They rejoiced when it appeared Hayes might win, but Grant sought to disarm their premature optimism. “Gentlemen,” he pronounced, “it looks to me as if Mr. Tilden was elected.”26 Though scarcely pleased by an ostensible Democratic victory, Grant was fully prepared to bow to the electorate’s wishes. “Everything depends now upon a fair count,” he told the press.27 While attending a closing banquet for the exhibition, Grant hurried from the hall when an emergency telegram arrived from Interior Secretary Chandler, who related a grisly saga of having dispatched a train southward to verify election returns only to have it “Kukluxed” and thrown from the track. “There is no doubt of our majority if we can secure an honest canvass,” Chandler predicted, “but the indications are that violence is to be freely resorted to, to prevent any returns from remote points in the interior. We shall need an army to protect us.”28
To deal with a spreading threat of disorder—Democrats began to rally to the cry of “Tilden or Blood!”—Grant mustered the stamina to weather one last crisis.29 He rushed Colonel Thomas H. Ruger to Florida and backed him with troops to ensure a quiet, peaceful ballot count, while he ordered General Christopher C. Augur to do the same in Louisiana. Grant proved remarkably fair-minded, declaring that “should there be any grounds of suspicion of fraudulent counting on either side it should be reported and denounced at once . . . Either party can afford to be disappointed in the result but the Country cannot afford to have the result tainted by the suspicion of illegal or false returns.”30 This remained his unswerving policy during the high-stakes drama now unfolding. The northern press cheered Grant’s actions in sending troops to avert vote tampering in Louisiana, South Carolina, and Florida, but until final returns were certified in these states, it was impossible to name a new president and the political system wobbled in a dangerous limbo.
Though scrupulously evenhanded, Grant was demonized by southern Democrats and rumors proliferated that he would be killed. John Singleton Mosby advised him to heed this rash talk. “I met Mosby on my way to the President’s,” Hamilton Fish wrote, “and he told me that the language of the Democrats now was more desperate and more threatening and violent than that of the Southern men on the Election of Lincoln in 1860.”31 To illustrate the vengeful southern mood, Mosby told how he himself had been threatened with arrest “because he prevented a Democrat at the Poles from clubbing a colored voter and had insisted on the right of the negro to vote.”32 True to Mosby’s prediction, Grant was peppered with death threats. One anonymous writer, signing himself “An Outlaw of the west,” gave him three weeks to prepare for His Maker: “I am bound under oath to take your life.”33 Klan members sent a letter adorned with a skull and crossbones, warning, “You and your assistant thieves will soon be assassinated.”34 At the same time, rumors floated about that a secret Democratic army would stage a military raid on Washington and declare Tilden the winner. To guard against this menace, Grant and Sherman redeployed troops from the interior to Washington and secured the federal arsenal along with three critical bridges leading to the capital.
The crisis came to a head in South Carolina. After the election, Grant heard stories of rifle clubs ringing polling places, allowing only Democrats to vote.35 Both the Republican governor Chamberlain and the Democratic contender Wade Hampton had claimed victory in the gubernatorial contest. On November 24, with the legislature slated to meet, Chamberlain told Grant that “armed and violent” Democrats would seek to block the session.36 Two days later, Grant and several cabinet members pondered reports that up to eight thousand rifle company members in South Carolina might seize the state legislature. On the spot, Grant instructed Secretary of War Cameron that Chamberlain was still the legally constituted governor, facing “resistance too formidable to be overcome by the State authorities,” and should have all necessary support against domestic violence.37 A few days later, Democrats invaded the South Carolina legislature, installing their own speaker and clerk and leaving the state in turmoil. As one black railway porter told Grant, at every stop on the train white men sent up hosannas for Wade Hampton and “Damnation to Every Negro, Grant, chamberlain and Company—for God Sake, General . . . Help me, to Come out of this Country of assassins.”38 South Carolina now had two governors and two state legislatures, greatly complicating the electoral fight over the presidency.
Just when Grant thought he could disengage from turbulent racial politics and contemplate a tranquil, post-presidential life, he was thrust back into some of the thorniest dilemmas ever to confront an American chief executive. At a dramatic cabinet session, Cameron proposed that federal troops eject the Democratic speaker and clerk from the South Carolina legislature, reinstating their Republican counterparts. When he swore “this is war and Revolution,” Grant retorted, “Decidedly no! no! It is no such thing.”39 Remembering the brouhaha over Sheridan’s expelling legislators in New Orleans, Grant explained that the president should not tamper with state politics, but simply provide a safe, peaceful setting for states to resolve their own disputes. He relayed this advice to Colonel Ruger in South Carolina, imploring him to avoid “unlawful use of the Military” by “taking men claiming seats out of the legislative hall.”40
On December 3, Grant received Tilden’s campaign manager, Representative Abram S. Hewitt of New York, and made it clear he would accept Tilden as the next president if he were lawfully chosen. With unusual vehemence he defended his actions in South Carolina, where he thought Democrats had stolen the election from Hayes by scaring away black voters, and he cited the need for federal troops when white rifle clubs ruled the state. He also made it crystal clear that if an armed mob attacked Congress, he would defend it. So wound up was the taciturn Grant that he spoke for a straight hour, perhaps a record outburst for him. As The New York Times marveled, “The President himself told a Republican Congressman this morning that he made the longest speech he had ever made in his life.”41 Approaching the end of his presidency, Grant again seemed more vocal and expressive in his comments, providing glimpses into an emotional life ordinarily screened by his opaque personality.
The electoral crisis reached a new phase on December 6 when the Electoral College electors were scheduled to meet in their respective capitals and cast their votes for president. It quickly became apparent that a new president could not be named because three of the contested states with warring governments—South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana—filed one set of election certificates for Hayes and another for Tilden. Their returning boards, which verified the election returns, were in Republican hands, further tainting the results in Democratic eyes. Faced with this agonizing dilemma, Congress in mid-Decembe
r called for a special bipartisan committee to settle the electoral crisis and favored the creation of “a tribunal whose authority none can question and whose decision all will accept as final.”42
Meanwhile, Grant had to deal with this dangerous stalemate. Repeatedly he heard how Democratic ruffians, scraped off the Baltimore and New York streets, would inflict mayhem on the capital, murdering the president and kidnapping Hayes. When a patriotic delegation appeared at the White House, styling themselves the Stars & Stripes Association and offering to protect the capital, Grant calmed them by saying there would be no disturbance. A cool hand at the helm, he prevented a frightening situation from fraying into partisan violence. As always, Grant was at his most levelheaded in a crisis. With memories of the Civil War still fresh, another bloody clash was far from unthinkable.
As in the past, Louisiana presented seemingly insurmountable problems. After the election, Grant heard of ballot boxes being destroyed there by Democrats and sent Senator John Sherman, Congressman Garfield, and other prominent observers to scrutinize the canvassers tallying the count. Sherman’s report described a travesty of justice. So intimidated had black voters been by night riders that overwhelmingly Republican parishes ended up in the Democratic column. “Organized clubs of masked armed men, formed as recommended by the central democratic committee, rode through the country at night, marking their course by the whipping, shooting, wounding, maiming, mutilation, and murder of women, children, and defenseless men.”43 A Senate investigating committee later ascertained that in a single parish, more than sixty black Republicans had been butchered before the election.
Louisiana Republicans and Democrats, in their eternal squabble, had formed rival state legislatures. Grant promised to act in a nonpartisan fashion, but his neutrality was tested when thousands of armed White League members laid siege to the statehouse, trained their guns on the courthouse, and ejected the sheriff. On January 11, Grant oversaw an acrimonious cabinet debate about what to do. Solidly interventionist in the past, he momentarily allied himself with conservatives. James D. Cameron and Zachariah Chandler grew exasperated that Grant wanted to wait until shots were fired before sending in federal troops. Despite Grant’s hesitation, he then came down hard on the side of the new Republican governor, Stephen B. Packard, telling General Augur he would not tolerate a state government being taken over “by illegal means.”44
Tired of the cutthroat politics in Washington, Grant labored under excruciating pressure as he confronted a choice of political poisons: either intervene in state politics and invite a northern outcry or stand back and allow thuggery to reign supreme in Louisiana. On January 17, Fish recorded an extraordinary conversation with a distraught Grant, who was so upset by Louisiana events that he couldn’t sleep. He seemed to be edging toward a nervous collapse and even doubted for a moment the wisdom of his past policies. He railed against incompetent carpetbag governors in the South who “had no interests there, but had simply gone there to hold office and so soon as they should lose it, intended to come away.” He also seemed to oppose the very black voting rights he had so courageously upheld: “He says he is opposed to the XV amendment and thinks it was a mistake; that it had done the negro no good, and had been a hindrance to the South, and by no means a political advantage to the North.”45 Two years later, in a discussion with the journalist John Russell Young, Grant clarified what he meant, saying that the Fourteenth Amendment had bolstered southern power by scrapping the rule that had once counted an African American as only three-fifths of a person for electoral purposes. Despite suppressing the vote of blacks, white southerners could now count them fully for election purposes, giving the “solid South” forty extra votes in the Electoral College and disproportionate influence in American politics. “They keep those votes, but disfranchise the negroes. That is one of the gravest mistakes in the policy of reconstruction.”46
However eager Grant might be for a Hayes presidency, he knew he would be crippled if his election rested on the outcome in two or three questionable southern states.47 In late January, Grant signed an act creating a bipartisan Electoral Commission, composed of five members of each house and five Supreme Court justices, to judge the validity of election returns from the contested states.48 Grant saw this as a peaceful exit, “a wise and constitutional means of escape,” from the political abyss into which the nation had sunk.49 The final seat on the commission went to Joseph P. Bradley of New Jersey, the Republican Supreme Court justice chosen by Grant, and gave Republicans an eight-to-seven edge on the panel.
While the Electoral Commission deliberated in February, Grant longed to be free of the intolerable burdens of office. “But three weeks remain until I close my official career,” he told Edwards Pierrepont. “Although so short a time, it appears to me interminable, my anxiety to be free from care is so great.”50 On February 9, Hayes won the Florida vote and on February 16 the Louisiana vote, stacking the odds heavily in his favor. “There is still some doubt, but apparently very little, of the result,” a satisfied Hayes wrote in his diary. “I would like to get support from good men of the South, late Rebels. How to do it is the question.”51 Convinced Hayes would win, Grant sent him a cordial invitation to stay in the White House until the inauguration, but Hayes thought this unwise given the murky situation and he didn’t arrive in Washington until March 2, right before the inauguration.
Consequential to the election outcome were the many private contacts in the capital between southern Democrats and Hayes’s northern Republican supporters. At Wormley’s Hotel on February 26, five Hayes people pledged that federal troops would be withdrawn from the South; new “redeemer” governments would be tolerated and “home rule” restored; the four southern Democrats promised, in return, fair treatment of the black community. The influence of the so-called Wormley Conference has been greatly overstated, for it merely culminated months of bargaining and confirmed what was already clear: that Hayes would bring an end to Reconstruction. It was a pyrrhic victory for Republicans, who sacrificed their idealism in exchange for perpetuating their rule. Shortly afterward, the special commission declared Hayes the winner in South Carolina, giving him a 185 to 184 victory in the Electoral College. Having ably presided over this troubled period, staying above the fray, Grant lauded the Electoral Commission as “a fine bit of self-government on the part of the people.”52
The fifteen-member body had split eight to seven, leading one irate Democrat to object that “we have been cheated, shamefully cheated,” while other Democrats bitterly emphasized Tilden’s victory in the popular vote and satirized Hayes as “His Fraudulency” or “Rutherfraud B. Hayes.”53 Just as Grant got ready to leave office, the disputed election amplified Democratic animosity to a new level of verbal violence. Many thought the Electoral Commission had winked at cheating committed by Republicans in the South, but Democrats had clearly engaged in widespread voter intimidation and Grant later stated that “the real fraud has been perpetrated by those who are raising the cry of fraud.”54 Despite the rancor, the prospect of two warring presidencies had been averted and the inauguration of Hayes would proceed smoothly.
All in all, Grant’s impartial handling of the election, in an extremely tense situation, had been one of his finest achievements. He had prevented bloodshed and ensured a peaceful transition of power. “If Tilden was declared elected I intended to hand him over the reins, and see him peacefully installed,” Grant said afterward. “I should have treated him as cordially as I did Hayes, for the question of the Presidency was then neither personal nor political, but national . . . The day that brought about the result and enabled me to leave the White House as I did, I regard as one of the happiest in my life.”55 Grant’s coolness in crisis and impeccable fairness reminded voters of why they had trusted him in the first place. “He comes up to the mark so grandly on great occasions,” wrote Ebenezer Hoar, “that I wish he were more careful of appearances in smaller matters.”56 Resolution of the crisis brought immediate solace
to a terribly overwrought, sleepless president. “The change was not so apparent to the world,” wrote Jesse Grant, “but to the family it was more than evident. The brooding gloom that had enveloped him as a cloak was gone and with us, he was all animation.”57
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DURING HIS EIGHT YEARS IN OFFICE, Grant had been bedeviled not so much by his policies, where his record was often excellent, but by personalities, where his record left much to be desired. When the cartoonist Thomas Nast visited him in his last months as president, he found him in a chastened mood, scandalized by the misbehavior of his underlings: “The President was overwhelmed . . . wherever he turned some new dishonor lay concealed.”58 In his last annual message to Congress, he confessed with artless candor, “It was my fortune or misfortune, to be called to the office of Chief Executive without any previous political training . . . Under such circumstances it is but reasonable to suppose that errors of judgment must have occurred.” His problems had stemmed from appointees, he said, many of them originally strangers. “It is impossible that where so many trusts are to be allotted that the right parties should be chosen in every instance.”59 Grant couldn’t admit that some wayward appointees were old colleagues, notably Orville Babcock, whom he had known too well and stood by too long.
