After Lincoln
Page 36
The uncontrolled bloodshed had convinced even many Democrats that Grant’s action was justified. On the scene, the army commander won over other white citizens by promising an impartial monitoring of their vote.
• • •
In Washington, Election Day passed without alarm. An early tally showed that Tilden could count on 184 of the required 185 electoral votes. Hayes, trailing with 166, would need every one of the votes being disputed in South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana.
Before he set off for bed, the president told his guests, “Gentlemen, it looks as if Mr. Tilden is elected.”
• • •
Hosting his own evening party, Rutherford Hayes heard that Tilden was expected to take New York City by fifty thousand votes, and he had reached Grant’s conclusion. As he and Lucy sent their guests home after midnight, however, Hayes seemed composed, almost cheerful. Only to himself did he confess that the future looked grim: The equality amendments would be nullified, chaos would still reign, and better economic times, for whites and blacks, would be “pushed off for years.”
But at least the tension had ended, and Hayes “fell into a refreshing sleep.”
• • •
As Hayes slept, retired general Daniel E. Sickles in New York was heading home after a Broadway show and a late supper. On the way, he decided to stop by the Republican Party headquarters at the Fifth Avenue Hotel.
Daniel Sickles
Most of the dejected staff was gone. Scanning the telegraph wires, however, Sickles saw a reason for hope that more despairing men had missed. Although many years had passed, Sickles remained notorious for his headstrong temperament, as well as for the unique plea that once saved his life.
Thirty-nine years old at the time, Sickles had been on trial for shooting to death Philip Barton Key, who was having an affair with his wife. It was in that case that Edwin Stanton had persuaded a jury—for the first time in the United States—that his client was not guilty by reason of temporary insanity.
During the war, Sickles repaired his reputation. He was awarded the Medal of Honor for gallantry at the Battle of Gettysburg, which had cost him a leg. After Sickles joined the Radical Republican attempt to remove Andrew Johnson, Grant as president overlooked the blemish in his civilian résumé and appointed him ambassador to Spain.
From the U.S. embassy, Sickles publicly romanced deposed queen Isabella II. To his nickname of “Devil Dan,” he added the more respectful “Yankee King of Spain.”
Sickles had resigned his post and was touring Europe when he learned that Samuel Tilden—whose Democratic policies he despised—was likely to win the 1876 election. Hurrying home as a volunteer, he found New York Republicans cool to his offer of aid, but Hayes appreciated his advice about how to exploit memories of the late war.
Alone now at Republican headquarters, Sickles tallied up the electors for himself: If Hayes held Oregon and then South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana, he would edge out Tilden in the electoral college, 185 to 184.
At once, Sickles drafted telegrams to the Republican officials in those four states with the same instructions: “With your state sure for Hayes, he is elected. Hold your state.”
Sickles had no standing in the campaign, however, and the hotel’s night clerk refused to forge the name of Zachariah Chandler, the Republican Party’s national chairman. Earlier in the evening, Chandler had retired to his room upstairs with a bottle of whiskey and instructions not to be disturbed.
Sickles was stymied until he ran into Chester A. Arthur in the lobby. As tax collector for the Port of New York, Arthur readily signed off on the wires and Sickles settled in to wait for the replies.
At the offices of the New York Times, editors were picking up the same faint hints that had spurred Sickles to action. Managing editor John C. Reid, a bitter-end Republican, rushed to the Fifth Avenue Hotel intent on preventing his party from issuing a premature concession.
Reid pushed his way through a crowd that was gathering to hear election news. Thirty minutes had passed since Sickles had received positive responses from Oregon and South Carolina and gone home.
Reid encountered William Chandler, a Republican lobbyist for the railroad interests, and demonstrated to him how Hayes could still win. Chandler tried to take him to Zachariah Chandler, who was no relation. But without the chairman’s room number, their random knocking alarmed female guests in two other rooms. Finally, Zachariah Chandler came to the door in his nightshirt.
The chairman was in no condition for an arithmetic lesson. After several futile minutes, Chandler told Reid to do whatever was necessary and went back to bed.
Reid drafted a telegram much like those sent by Sickles and took a carriage to the central office of Western Union. When the clerk said that the Republicans had no account at his branch, Reid told him to bill the charges to the New York Times.
• • •
Zachariah Chandler was himself again by the time he received answers to Reid’s wires, and he sent out his own telegram: “Hayes has 185 electoral votes and is elected.”
Until that moment, Democratic newspapers had been jubilant. Only in Chicago did the Republican Tribune lament, “The Country Given Over to Democratic Greed and Plunder.”
In Ohio, Rutherford Hayes had appeared as usual at his office, showing no sign that losing had devastated him. He told a reporter for the Cincinnati Times that the Republicans and the country would all survive the Democrats’ victory, but he did care for the poor colored men of the South. Hayes predicted that white Southerners would ignore the recent constitutional amendments and then the colored man’s fate would be worse than when he was in slavery, with a humane master to look after his interests.
At the White House, Grant shared Hayes’s misgivings. He issued an order that army commanders in Florida and Louisiana be vigilant to preserve peace and good order. The nation’s newspapers reported Grant’s demand that any suspicion of ballot tampering must be reported and denounced at once.
The president added, “No man worthy of the office of the presidency should be willing to hold it if counted in or placed there by fraud. Either party can afford to be disappointed in the results, but the country cannot afford to have the result tainted by the suspicion of illegal or false returns.”
Grant’s idealism had not been shared by either party at the polls. In Florida, the Republican board of state canvassers converted Tilden’s win of 86 votes into a loss to Hayes by 922 votes. Republicans in South Carolina worked the same legerdemain, certifying as winners not only Hayes but their party’s governor and state legislators.
Once again, the country turned to Louisiana, since Tilden needed only one elector and was running ahead in the state by 6,400 votes. But in the past, the state’s certifying board had been censured after two different congressional investigations.
When Grant raised the question of fraud with his cabinet, Alphonso Taft was among those who urged him to send troops, challenge the Louisiana verdict, and announce victory for Hayes. Secretary of State Fish’s approach was more to Grant’s liking, and he appointed a bipartisan panel of senators to travel to New Orleans and assure the nation that the final tally was as honest as possible.
The group’s predictable findings were no help. Democrats insisted that their initial count had been accurate. Republicans stressed the intimidation of black voters. A Louisiana parish that had recorded 1,688 Republican votes in the last election showed only one this year. Republicans estimated that throughout the South at least a quarter of a million blacks had been frightened away from the polls. They told of songs that the white rifle clubs sang as they rode through the countryside at midnight:
“A charge to keep I have, a God to glorify.
“If a nigger don’t vote with us, he shall forever die.”
Northern congressmen came away shaken by testimony of the violence against blacks. Eliza Pinkston from Ouachita Parish was carried into the proceedings, where she displayed deep gashes on her thigh and breast and serious wou
nds to her head. She described events on the Saturday night before the election:
An enforcement party of Democrats had ridden up to her cabin, kicked in the door, slashed her husband with knives, shot him seven times, killed the baby she was holding, raped her, shot and stabbed her, and left her for dead.
Senator John Sherman wrote to assure Hayes that he would have carried Louisiana handsomely in a fair election. He called the state’s parishes “more like the history of hell than of civilized and Christian communities.”
• • •
On December 6, 1876, the legal date for the meeting of the electoral college, Louisiana’s canvassing board announced that Hayes had won the state by 4,807 votes. That verdict gave him a sweep of the three disputed Southern states.
Democratic slates in South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana convened separately, however, hoping to eke out one more electoral vote for Tilden. Intricate legal maneuvering had failed. Attempted bribery had failed. Even a plot to lock up Republican electors in South Carolina until after the vote had come to nothing.
Discouraged but undaunted, the Democrats’ national chairman announced on December 13 the election of Tilden and Hendricks. Deploring the claim as an incitement to violence, the New York Herald compared it to “a gentleman in Utica, the inmate of a public institution, who regards himself as the emperor of China.”
The memory of the horrific casualties only a dozen years earlier tempered the nation’s response now. Partisan threats of violence were ignored, even laughed away. Yet without a compromise, the Democratic majority in the House might declare Democrat Samuel Tilden the president of the United States. Because the Constitution provided for the Senate to name the vice president, that position might go to Republican William Wheeler.
The turbulent state of American politics made a solution even harder to achieve. After the Crédit Mobilier scandal disqualified Schuyler Colfax for Grant’s re-election ticket, the president turned to Henry Wilson. But last year, Wilson had died in office, and Senator Thomas W. Ferry of Michigan had become acting president of the U.S. Senate.
As set out by the Twelfth Amendment in 1803, the limits of that position were hazy. Republicans held that the Senate president was empowered both to count the votes and to announce the new president. Democrats claimed that he could only report the tally before sending the ballots to the House. Under that interpretation, Tilden would be declared the winner.
The impasse was broken when Iowa congressman George McCrary persuaded the House to let the Speaker appoint five members to meet with the same number of senators and justices of the Supreme Court. They would then come up with a solution—either a law or a constitutional amendment.
Democrats knew that Samuel Tilden, sure he had won, opposed any compromise. But in Washington the frosty governor had no reserves of popularity to enforce his wishes.
Hayes was also watching from the sidelines. He disapproved of the tactics of men like William Chandler and said he wanted “no taint of dishonesty” on the Republican side.
Roscoe Conkling sent word that his continued support hinged on Hayes’s repudiating his promise of reform. Hayes refused. But tacitly he was agreeing to other conditions so long as they were kept sufficiently vague. He stressed that he would promote honest and capable local government throughout the South, while his agents gave a guarantee to “the better class of white men” that Hayes would recall federal troops from everywhere in the former Confederacy.
Hayes was annoyed that Tom Ferry had not made the call on his own, and some of the nominations for the new commission alarmed him. But when the Supreme Court settled as its fifth member on Joseph P. Bradley, a Republican from New Jersey, Hayes began to feel confident. “The committee seems to be a good one,” he said.
• • •
Deliberations began on February 1, 1877, with the first questions being raised about the count in Florida. The previous month, the state’s supreme court had upheld the Democrats’ victory. But on February 9, the new Washington commission awarded Florida to Hayes. The vote, thanks to Justice Bradley, was eight to seven.
As the eight–seven decisions continued, Democrats on the committee did not listen to their outraged constituents, who called on them to resign or filibuster. Instead, the members dug in to extract concessions from the Hayes camp. They wanted nothing less than complete Democratic control over Louisiana and South Carolina. To get it, they bypassed public hearings and began to meet in secret behind locked doors.
The third and final such session was held at Wormley’s Hotel on the corner of Fifteenth and H streets, NW, and it would become notorious. Gathering there for a final agreement were Hayes’s trusted Ohio coterie, including former attorney general William Evarts and Senator Sherman. Southern congressmen and wealthy civic leaders had come to represent Louisiana and South Carolina.
James Garfield, attending for the first time, was appalled to learn that Hayes’s men had already committed him to very specific terms, including a Democrat in the cabinet, a Southern railroad contract, and, crucially, a promise to withdraw all federal troops from the former Confederacy.
Trying belatedly to protect his candidate, Garfield spoke up: “The entire nation would honor these Southern men who are resisting anarchy and thus preventing civil war,” he said. “But neither they nor we could afford to do anything that would be, or appear to be, a political bargain.”
With that, Garfield picked up his hat and left the hotel.
That the fate of four million black Americans was sealed at a hotel owned by James Wormley, a wealthy black businessman, was an irony too rich to ignore, and the meeting quickly took its place in Washington lore. Yet both parties were simply acknowledging ways in which the past dozen years had not changed the American South.
CHAPTER 20
JIM CROW (1877)
ON MONDAY, MARCH 5, 1877, RELIEVED TO see the impasse ending, thirty thousand Americans gathered at the East Portico of the Capitol for the inauguration of Rutherford B. Hayes as the nation’s nineteenth president.
Three days earlier, bitter Democrats had yielded only after prolonging the congressional session to 4:10 a.m. on March 2 before they would allow Thomas Ferry to announce 185 electoral votes for the Republican ticket.
The New York Sun protested in its headline, “The Fraud Consummated,” and, later, “Mr. Hayes Is Not President.” When outrage had inspired threats of assassination and renewed violence, President Grant and Secretary of State Fish had arranged as a precaution for Hayes to take the oath of office on Sunday evening in a secret White House ceremony.
• • •
Although Grant had agreed to withdraw army troops from Louisiana, he was now delaying the order to maintain calm. But Stephen Packard, the Republican governor, had been warned that he could expect to be replaced soon by his Democratic challenger. As realists in the North saw it, both Packard and Republican Daniel H. Chamberlain in South Carolina were governors in name only. They controlled no more than a square mile around their statehouses, and that much only because of troops sent by Washington.
The entire U.S. Army was down to twenty-five thousand soldiers, however, and Democrats in the House were threatening to cut the military appropriation still further. Add that to a growing sentiment across the nation that Radical Reconstruction had been a failure, and neither the outgoing Grant nor the incoming Hayes was willing to go on propping up those last two Southern regimes.
Even Hayes’s waving the bloody shirt had not traumatized voters in New York and Indiana enough that they feared a return to Democratic rule. The country’s attention was focused instead on the lagging economy and the allure of Western expansion. Congressional appropriations were available for new railroad lines, not for funding black schools.
Even as Hayes bowed to that reality, he hoped to guarantee a secure future for the black citizens of the South and, not incidentally, for the Republican Party there.
• • •
Within weeks of his inaugural address, Hayes acted
on its most widely quoted phrase—“he serves his party best who serves his country best.” By withdrawing the last Northern troops, however, he was ending the careers of the two Southern governors whose party loyalty had made him president.
Daniel Chamberlain was enraged by the betrayal and vowed to leave South Carolina along with the troops and go north to practice law in New York City. Stephen Packard tried to keep control of the few square blocks of New Orleans, but his Democratic opponent, Francis Nicholls, was undercutting his efforts with demonstrations of goodwill. Nicholls appointed twenty-one blacks to state offices and ratified the election of another 240.
Andrew Kellar, who had represented Hayes at Wormley’s Hotel, arrived in New Orleans to buy off members of an arbitration commission set up to resolve the impasse in Nicholls’s favor. Kellar assured the president’s son, Webb Rutherford, that responsible white men of the city’s Cotton Exchange and the hardworking local blacks “will unite and support the administration.”
Pinckney Pinchback had been offstage during the wrangling. For three frustrating years, he had waited for Congress to grant him the seats he had won, first in the House, then in the Senate. Pinchback had watched as the Mississippi legislature sent to Washington thirty-four-year-old Blanche Kelso Bruce, a former slave who had become a successful cotton farmer.
Without Pinchback’s formidable enemies, Bruce was promptly seated, while Pinckney Pinchback was finally rejected and entered into a political eclipse that lasted until his death in 1921.
On April 17, 1877, the U.S. Senate adjourned, silencing the last voices critical of Hayes’s Southern strategy. Two days later, Chamberlain wired the president from Columbia that he was removing the last federal troops from the American South.
The news came as Hayes was hosting his first state dinner, honoring two visiting sons of the Russian tsar. But when toasting with strong wine punch created unseemly hilarity, the president banned all liquor from future White House dinners, and Hayes himself became a teetotaler.