After Lincoln

by A. J. Langguth

  Being more loyal to the Union than to its president, Tilden denounced Lincoln’s wartime curbs on constitutional rights, and in 1864 he backed George McClellan and his call for an immediate cease-fire.

  After the North achieved victory, Tilden became party chairman in the nation’s leading Democratic state. When Salmon Chase lost the presidential nomination in 1868, his daughter Kate blamed Tilden personally, adding, “I fear that when the South seceded, the brains of the party went with it.”

  Even though the Democrats lost twice to Grant, Tilden scored a victory of his own when he took on William M. Tweed and his powerful machine, the “Society of Saint Tammany”—a divinity not found in the traditional Catholic hierarchy.

  Boss Tweed, a former bookkeeper, had amassed power through his unabashed combination of bribes and street-corner bullying. Tammany’s slogan was “Something for everyone,” and it was Tweed who introduced the Irish immigrants flooding into New York to the wisdom of “vote early and vote often.”

  From the humble position of deputy street commissioner, Tweed could appoint state supreme court justices and rake in exorbitant kickbacks from city contracts. His masterstroke was the New York County Courthouse, where construction began in 1862 and was completed only a full ten years later.

  Tweed carpenters were paid $2.1 million for work worth $30,000, and his plasterer received $1.9 million. Critics charged that all New York City could have been carpeted for the nearly $5 million spent to cover the courthouse floors. The total original budget had been $250,000. Tammany ran up the bill until estimates of the final cost went from $4 million to—not improbably—$14 million.

  Boss Tweed

  Politicians and Tweed’s contractors were not the only ones offered a share. Thomas Nast’s many cartoons for Harper’s Weekly featured stereotypes of ignorant and drunken Irish immigrants. But when Nast drew blood at Tammany Hall, Tweed sent an agent to offer him a personal art scholarship—five hundred thousand dollars, for study in Europe.

  At the time, Nast was being paid an annual five thousand dollars for his Tweed cartoons, but his other drawings paid handsomely enough that he could refuse the offer. Nast explained that he had no time for travel since he was busy putting a gang of thieves behind bars.

  As the Democratic Party chairman, Tilden had his own regular dealings with Tammany Hall, and yet when the New York Times revealed the orgy of corruption in 1872, he claimed to have had no knowledge or suspicion. Quietly, however, Tilden had already taken modest steps toward reform, and Tweed had mocked his upstate values:

  Tilden, he said, “wants to stop the pickup, starve out the boys, and run the city as if it was a damned little country store in New Lebanon.”

  Despite his recent dismal losses at the polls, Tilden was now edging back into the fray. As a candidate for the state assembly, he devoted ten days with accountants to going over Tammany’s bank records. The result was evidence that Tweed had pocketed more than $1 million of public money.

  In a Cooper Union speech, Tilden attacked the “cabal of corrupt men” who had seized local government for their “personal plunder.”

  New York governor John Hoffman was deeply indebted to Tweed, but he was forced to investigate the charges. As a special agent, Hoffman chose Charles O’Connor, famous for successfully defending Jefferson Davis against charges of treason.

  On Election Day, Tilden and his reformers carried every contest. Tweed himself was not up for re-election, but he never again showed up in the state senate seat he had paid for.

  One confrontation between the two men had left Tilden trembling with anger, and he predicted that Tweed would “close his career in jail or in exile.”

  So it proved. The Times exposé resulted in Tweed’s being indicted on 120 charges ranging from forgery to grand larceny. After he was sentenced to twelve years in prison, Tweed escaped with his henchmen to California and had moved on to Spain before being extradited to New York. He would die in prison in 1878, shortly after his fifty-fifth birthday.

  New Yorkers rewarded Tilden for his role in vanquishing Tammany Hall by electing him their governor in 1874. He carried his reformer’s zeal to Albany, where he thwarted a scheme to bilk millions from the state’s canal system.

  As the next presidential election approached, a friendly editor wrote that he was praying for a Hercules who would clean out Grant’s Augean stables as thoroughly as Tilden was ridding the muck from New York.

  Almost a thousand Democratic convention delegates concluded that Samuel Tilden was that man. Tilden might seem haughty and cold, but hard times had slashed the price of Southern cotton nearly in half and contributed to the Democrats’ regaining the House in 1874. Two years later, personality should matter less than party label.

  Tilden’s support among the nation’s bankers seemed to guarantee him ample funds for the coming campaign. Since voters were less attracted by the idealism of the radical Republicans, it did not matter that no blacks were in the convention hall on the day that Tilden was nominated.

  On the Republican side, even Julia Grant could not ignore the sentiment in the House of Representatives against a third term for her husband. By a vote of 233 to 18, members approved a resolution praising the two-term limit that George Washington had imposed upon himself. A third term “would be unwise, unpatriotic and fraught with peril for our free institutions.”

  With Grant out of the competition, the Democrats also would not face the undeniable appeal of former House Speaker James G. Blaine. Clean government would be a potent campaign issue, and Blaine had been tarnished by a dubious railroad deal in Arkansas.

  Instead Republicans turned to Governor Hayes. As his vice president, they chose William A. Wheeler, a New York congressman who had not only voted against the retroactive pay raise of 1873 but returned his share to the U.S. Treasury. Without enthusiasm, The Nation magazine described the ticket as “eminently respectable men—the most respectable men, in the strict sense of the word, the Republican Party has ever nominated.”

  Summing up Rud Hayes, Henry Adams was more succinct: “A third-rate nonentity.”

  Hayes would not be attacking Tilden on matters of race. His own ardor for black rights had cooled along with that throughout the country, especially after the recent Supreme Court ruling in U.S. v. Cruikshank that overturned the only three convictions from the Colfax massacre. The charges, brought under the Enforcement Act of 1870, had alleged a conspiracy to deny the victims their civil rights.

  The justices, five to four, held that the prosecution had not specified race as being the motive for the riot. More broadly, the Court limited the federal government’s role in punishing violations of Negro rights. It reserved to state and local authorities the penalties for crimes by individuals. When those officials refused to act, blacks were left unprotected.

  • • •

  Given the venerable anniversary, 1876 was being hailed as the Centennial Election. To honor the nation’s founding, nearly ten million visitors—20 percent of the population—journeyed to Philadelphia for an exposition called “the Progress of the Age.”

  The celebratory mood was marred only briefly by news that George Armstrong Custer and two hundred of his Seventh Cavalry had been cut down in Montana at the Battle of Little Big Horn. Led by chiefs Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, Sioux and Cheyenne warriors had been protecting the land deeded them under an 1868 treaty.

  For Grant, Custer’s loss marked a more serious defeat: the failure of the president’s attempt to preserve peace with the native peoples of the Great Plains. Throughout his career, Grant’s sympathies had gone to the tribes, not to the white settlers encroaching on their land. As a young officer in California, he had written to reassure his wife, who worried about the danger of living among Indians:

  The neighboring tribes, Grant wrote, “are the most harmless people you ever saw. It really is my opinion that the whole race would be harmless and peaceable if they were not put upon by whites.”

  To his brother, Grant attributed t
he condition of “this poor remnant of a once powerful tribe” to “those blessings of ‘civilization,’ whiskey and smallpox.”

  Over the years, Grant had never trusted George Custer’s judgment and regarded the battle of Little Big Horn as “wholly unnecessary.” As president, he had tried to end corruption within the Indian Bureau and promote fair dealings with the tribes. It galled him now that his countrymen were hailing Custer as a fallen hero.

  • • •

  During the presidential campaign, a third candidate had emerged from an upstart Greenback Party. At age eighty-five and firmly committed to the workingman, Peter Cooper was demanding an end to the entrenched oligarchy of rich men who ran the country. According to Cooper, they were enslaving the mass of Americans as ruthlessly as slavery had ever done.

  But that message was not resonating within the Republican Party, where the pliant approach of its Liberal faction on racial justice had won many converts. Northerners might still deplore the lack of education among former slaves. But—unlike General Howard and other Radicals—they now often tended to blame the slaves themselves.

  “The truth is, the Negroes are ignorant, many of them not more than half civilized,” one Northerner wrote, and “no match for the whites.” He concluded that the Republican policy toward the South had been “wrong.”

  As Hayes campaigned, he saw that only one issue could galvanize a Republican like that man, and it was not racial equality. Nor, despite Democratic strategy, was it civil service reform. Republicans feared most that the election could deliver the White House to their same wartime enemies who had just taken the House again.

  Hayes saw the bad economy as his “deadliest foe, and our strong ground is the dread of the solid South, rebel rule, etc., etc.”

  But to press for that change in emphasis, Hayes risked alienating the reformers who were demanding his commitment to erasing the stigma of the Grant years. From Harvard Yard, college president Charles Eliot spoke for them when he reported “less & less faith that Hayes & reform are synonymous.”

  Hayes had evidence for his new priority. From the U.S. attorney general, Alphonso Taft, he learned that sustaining several Southern governments would require more federal troops. Such troops were vital for retaining Republican electoral votes, but Democrats in the House of Representatives “had crippled us very much” by refusing to appropriate funds for the army.

  Democrats were acting on the choice set out starkly at Charles Sumner’s funeral by Mississippi congressman Lucius Lamar when he warned that the South “must be part of the government or held in duress under it.”

  If Republicans could retain power in a state only with soldiers at their side, Democrats argued that the time had come to let that state revert to its natural leaders—even though they were the Confederate rebels, wealthy planters, and former slave owners. Southern Republicans worried that Northerners might soothe their conscience by accepting the same assurances of racial harmony that had lulled Liberals during the last presidential election. Those Republicans knew the South, and they knew better.

  Alphonso Taft agreed that Southern Republicans had suffered “incredible” wrongs from a Democratic Party that had adopted murder or “a common threat of intimidation” to keep blacks from voting or testifying in court.

  The attorney general said he had written off Mississippi, where the Democrats had scared off every black man from registering to vote. But he vowed to keep trying to enforce the Fifteenth Amendment in Louisiana, Florida, and South Carolina.

  • • •

  To Hayes, Taft’s warning was irrefutable proof that Republicans had to embrace “the bloody shirt campaign,” familiar shorthand for the choice that Hayes wanted his party to hammer home: “Are you for the Rebellion, or are you for the Union?”

  Indications suggested that Hayes would carry his home state of Ohio but that Indiana would fall to the Democrats, since the state’s governor, Thomas Hendricks, was Tilden’s running mate. To win, Hayes would need to peel off electoral votes from the Southern states where some 2,800 federal troops remained stationed.

  Even at that, New York could be crucial. Republicans hoped to offset the appeal of Governor Tilden with campaigning by their New York senator, Roscoe Conkling. But Conkling had ridden to Congress on his iron control of the New York Customs House. He detested reformers and had not forgiven Hayes for a tepid early pledge to overhaul the civil service.

  Carl Schurz, who was campaigning for Hayes in New York’s German communities, was angered by the apathy of the Conkling political machine. “If the Republicans do not carry New York,” he complained to Hayes, “it will be their own fault.”

  Schurz urged Hayes to announce his own plan for reforming campaign financing. Since Republican presidents had held the White House for the past sixteen years, thousands of officeholders owed their jobs to the Republican Party. So far, at each election they had been called on to prove their gratitude.

  Any employee making more than a thousand dollars a year was expected to contribute 2 percent of his salary to the Republican campaign fund. If he refused, he was labeled uncooperative and his name given to his superiors.

  Before Schurz broke away with the Liberals, he had failed to persuade the Grant administration to end that extortion. Now he had no more success with Hayes. If what Schurz was advocating “so earnestly were carried into effect,” Hayes explained, “it would be a surrender of the campaign.”

  As a sop, Hayes sent party officials a letter calling the payments a “plain departure from correct principles.” But he did not require them to stop, and federal employees ended up contributing substantially to his campaign.

  Among the Democrats, Tilden was annoying his backers by contributing very little of his own fortune, which was estimated at $5 million, and probably more.

  Not knowing of Tilden’s tight fist, Republicans continued to worry about being outspent. Alphonso Taft tried to reassure Hayes by noting that the Enforcement Act of five years earlier had contained specific safeguards against Democratic fraud. Taft said he could guarantee “a reasonably honest election in New York.”

  But Hayes was not to be comforted. He predicted that if he lost, it would be because of bribery and stuffed ballot boxes in the North and “violence and intimidation” in the South.

  • • •

  Methodical Samuel Tilden was working to correct his own party’s weaknesses. First, he had to smooth over a division on monetary policy with his vice presidential candidate. Thomas Hendricks was a leading advocate of soft money, unlike Tilden and his New York financiers. Hendricks believed in helping farmers through the economic depression by printing greenbacks, since the resulting inflation would ease the repayment of debts. Tilden, to the contrary, was being vilified as “the Great Forecloser.”

  As a distraction, the Democratic platform in St. Louis had sought to prove that Grant might remain personally popular but that his administration was impossible to defend. Their litany was unsparing:

  “When the annals of this Republic show the disgrace and censure of a Vice President; a late Speaker of the House of Representatives marketing his rulings as a presiding officer; three Senators profiting secretly by their votes as law-makers; five chairmen of the leading committees of the late House of Representatives exposed in jobbery; a late Secretary of the Treasury forcing balances in the public accounts; a late Attorney-General misappropriating public funds; a Secretary of the Navy enriched or enriching friends by percentages levied off the profits of contracts with his departments; an Ambassador to England censured in a dishonorable speculation; the President’s private secretary barely escaping conviction upon trial for guilty complicity in frauds upon the revenue; a Secretary of War impeached for high crimes and misdemeanor—the demonstration is complete” that only men from the opposition party can restore honesty to government.

  • • •

  The New York Times was trying to boost Republican chances by questioning the effect of Tilden’s lucrative law practice on benefits
to the nation’s railroads, and a campaign song had taken up that theme: “Sly Sam, the Railroad Thief.”

  More seriously, Tilden would be asking Southerners to overlook his years of outspoken opposition to slavery. To make amends, Tilden sent emissaries South to explain away as “youthful indiscretions” the statements he had made in his midforties.

  Tilden’s aides also saw to it that prominent former Confederates who visited New York were escorted to his residence at 15 Gramercy Park. There, according to the editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal, they could satisfy themselves that Governor Tilden, while undeniably a Yankee, “measured to the Southern standard of the gentleman in politics.”

  For all of his own bias, President Grant was determined to bring rigorous impartiality to the election of his successor. He faced an early test on the Fourth of July in Hamburg, South Carolina, when two white men rode up to a band of black militia parading down a public street.

  After curses and threats, the black troops parted to let the two pass. But the next day, the father of one of them filed a suit against the militia commander for obstruction. Saying that he feared violence in open court, the commander took refuge with other blacks in the town’s armory.

  The white attorney for the prosecution, a former Confederate general named Matthew C. Butler, demanded that the blacks turn over the armory’s weapons to the local white authorities.

  In the shootout that followed, the black town marshal was killed and five black troopers were murdered after being captured. During the next week, the Democrats threatened further violence and announced they would not hire or rent land to any black Republicans. Black Democrats were caught in the cross fire, sometimes stripped and beaten for their allegiance to the white man’s party.

  As violence spread, Grant declared a state of insurrection and sent more than three companies of federal troops to Columbia.