by Conrad Black
10. THE 1876 ELECTION, HAYES, GARFIELD, ARTHUR, AND CLEVELAND’S FIRST TERM
In 1876, the leading Republican for the presidential election was the former Speaker of the House and senator from Maine, James G. Blaine, known to his followers after his nominating speech as “the plumed knight.” He was a formidable figure, but was successfully smeared for alleged skullduggery with railway promoters, and the nomination went to General Rutherford B. Hayes, governor of Ohio. Congressman William A. Wheeler of New York was nominated for vice president. The Democrats chose Samuel J. Tilden, the distinguished reform governor of New York, and Senator Thomas A. Hendricks of Indiana. Even with large numbers of African Americans now voting in the South, the Democrats were assured of victory there because of the en bloc white adherence to the enemies of the Union Army and Radical Reconstruction. In the rest of the country, although there was a northern bias for the Republicans as the party of victory in war against the tawdry collection of Democratic doughfaces and defeatist Copperheads before and during the war, the large numbers of immigrants flooding into the great cities meant that the makings of Democratic victory were there for a strong candidate whose loyalty could not be impugned. General McClellan, the do-nothing army commander fired by Lincoln, had had the impudence to run against Lincoln on a defeatist platform in 1864; Horatio Seymour, who wanted a partial appeasement of the South in 1860, vocally criticized Lincoln’s war policy, and placated the New York anti-draft rioters, was not a presentable candidate in 1868 against the commander of the Grand Army of the Republic (Grant). Greeley was a flake who first opposed the war and then urged all manner of will-o’-the-wisp ideas on Lincoln, and was not a serious candidate in 1872. But Tilden was a serious candidate. The Democrats won 14 of 16 presidential elections from 1800 to 1856 with variations of the Jackson formula of assuring but containing slavery and guaranteeing the Union. The Republicans won 14 of the next 18 elections as the party of the Union, victory, emancipation, and maximum economic growth. But many of those elections were not foregone conclusions, as most of the earlier Democratic victories were, as first the Federalists and then the Whigs collapsed and vanished. Once the Democrats got free of candidates tainted with ambiguity on the mighty cause of the Union, as McClellan, Seymour, and Greeley were, they won the South and could compete strongly in the rest of the country, and when they did not fall into the hands of factional leaders, ran closely with the Republicans, including in the five elections starting in 1876.
The election of 1876 would be seminal for the Union. Tilden won the popular vote, 4.28 million to 4.04 million. The Republicans contested the results in Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina, and the Democrats contested Oregon. The three southern states were the only ones still under the control of the Radical Republicans, backed by the Union Army. In all the other states of the South, the Radicals had been jettisoned by the voters as the plundering and perversity of military-backed rule alienated the majority, even where substantial numbers of white voters were still unregistered. Debt levels had risen by several hundred percent in almost all of the southern states, though it must be said that large expenses were required, especially in Georgia and the Carolinas, to repair war damage. Almost all the southern states had set up school systems for African Americans and the regime of slavery had been replaced by one of segregation. Ironically, the elimination of the three-fifths rule from the Constitution, which had credited the southern states with three-fifths of the slave population for purposes of calculating the number of their congressmen and Electoral College members, was even more favorable to the South. Those states prevented the African Americans, though emancipated, from voting, and yet they were entirely counted for congressional districting and Electoral College purposes. As so often happens, those who seem to lose, win. The South could have negotiated as late as 1863, compensated emancipation and won the representation of the African Americans in the Congress and the Electoral College without allowing them to vote.
In 1876, Hayes would need all the contested electoral votes to be elected. The Constitution was ambiguous about counting the ballots: the vice president of the United States was to open the Electoral College ballots in the presence of both houses of Congress and the votes would then be counted. The Senate was Republican and the House Democratic, and each could be assumed to count in a partisan way. Congress navigated through the problem with an Electoral Commission, of five congressmen, five senators, and five Supreme Court justices, four designated in the bill, two appointees of each party. The fifth justice was to be chosen by the other four, and it was understood that it would be Justice David Davis, an independent, but he was chosen U.S. senator from Illinois and his place on the commission was taken by Republican appointee Joseph P. Bradley. Bradley had initially leaned to Tilden, who almost undoubtedly won the election, but finally, barely a week before Inauguration Day, came down for Hayes by refusing to “look behind the results,” enabling Hayes to win the election 185 electoral votes to 184. The Oregon decision was undoubtedly correct, as the Democratic governor of Oregon illegally disqualified a Republican elector. But the southern results, based on Republican Reconstruction election boards rejecting large numbers of Tilden votes for extremely suspect reasons, despite the antics of Democratic “rifle clubs” to intimidate black voters, were probably unjust. (Such a counting problem would be addressed by legislation in 1887, giving the states the authority to determine where their electoral votes rightfully went.)
Tilden was a very distinguished and upright man and he agreed to abide by the decision, and carried his party with him, on condition that Hayes and his senior partisans agree to withdraw the armed forces from the South, name at least one southerner to the cabinet, and provide a generous allocation for internal improvements—physical reconstruction from war damage, in fact—in the southern states. Hayes also, a Union general and respected governor, was a man of integrity and honored his word to the letter. He appointed Joseph Key of Tennessee as postmaster general and withdrew all Union Army personnel from the South within two months of his inauguration. The era of “the carpetbaggers” and Union soldiers in the South, supporting African American officeholders, saw governments that varied in quality from place to place and that were sometimes pretty patchy and corrupt. It was a difficult aftermath to a terrible war, but the 1876 election result, though it contradicted democracy, was, due to the statesmanship of both candidates, but Governor Tilden in particular, an important step in the reunification of the national spirit. Henceforth, the South was solidly Democratic for the next 80 years, because the Democratic nominees always won, and when the Democrats controlled the Congress, approximately half of those years, the principal congressional committee chairmen, on the basis of seniority, were almost always southerners. For the losing side in such a bitter and protracted struggle, the South emerged, after a brief period of subjugation, with a very strong blocking position in the U.S. Capitol, and played it astutely, a new refinement to American federalism. Hayes appointed as secretary of state William Maxwell Everts, his counsel through the post-electoral struggle and one of the country’s most eminent barristers, in the same tradition as the outgoing Hamilton Fish.
Grant is generally credited with promoting African American rights and almost wiping out the Ku Klux Klan, and restoring sound currency. He was ineffective in combating a severe recession in his second term and was too loyal to corrupt officials of his administration. His retirement was marred by a business failure in a company led by his son. Grant was wiped out financially, paying off the Vanderbilt family with personal mementos of his military career. Diagnosed with inoperable throat cancer, he completed his memoirs just before his death in July 1885, aged 63; they were published by his friend Mark Twain, had a huge critical and commercial success, and restored his family’s fortunes. U.S. Grant is generally reckoned an outstanding general, an admirable man, and now, a moderately capable if uneven president.
The Hayes presidency was the most tranquil since that of John Quincy Adams. The Bland-Allison Ac
t of 1878 required Treasury purchases of silver, but only at $2 million per month, which was not inflationary. Hayes alienated the Republican bosses of New York by suspending New York port customs collector Chester A. Arthur and his naval assistant, Alonzo B. Cornell, nominees of New York Republican boss Senator Roscoe Conkling. This and the president’s scrupulous conduct of civil service hiring constituted a distinct advance in probity of government after the patronage free-for-all tolerated by the indulgent President Grant. Hayes also retained, by vetoing Democratic riders to appropriation bills, the right of the president to use the armed forces to assure fair congressional elections, frustrating southern Democratic designs to impose even more outrageous vitiations of electoral democracy in that region, not so much against the diminished Republican Party of the South as against the few liberal Democrats who raised their heads in that unwelcoming post-bellum ambiance. The African Americans were already effectively excluded by a welter of poll taxes and literary tests.
In foreign policy, the only noteworthy developments were three 1880 treaties. Under the Samoan Treaty, the United States concerted with Samoan chieftains to keep Germany from construing Chancellor Bismarck’s famous claim to “a place in the sun” as entitling it to take over Samoa. The U.S. assumed some non-exclusive rights and set up some facilities in the port of Pago Pago. In the Madrid Convention, the United States joined European powers in restricting extra-territorial rights of Moroccans; the French and Germans were already maneuvering competitively in and around Morocco. Hayes made the minimal response politically possible to complaints about Chinese immigration, replete with wails of alarm over the “Yellow Peril” and so forth, with the Chinese Treaty, which amended the existing arrangement and gave the U.S. the right to “regulate, limit, or suspend” but not terminate the right of Chinese laborers to emigrate to the United States. In light of the unusual nature of his election, President Hayes had foresworn reelection and as was his custom, adhered to his word. He was an unexciting but competent and respectable chief of state. For the purposes of this book, he followed the sensible strategy of the era, reduced internal tensions, modestly cleaned up government, and by benign passivity facilitated the meteoric rise of the population, prosperity, and industrial might of America; in his way and time, an almost ideal president. He and Tilden showed that America, despite the horrible war and heavy-handed occupation of a third of the country and the corruption that abounded, retained what George Orwell would call, in another time and country, a government of decent men.
The Republicans met at Chicago in June 1880, and the convention became a battle between the “stalwarts,” by which was meant those who wanted to take office again waving “the bloody shirt” of war and Union, fading a bit after 15 years, as a cover for relatively self-interested and patronage-tainted government, and the reformers. Senator Roscoe Conkling led the stalwarts, though he knew he would not be a presentable candidate for president himself, and championed a return to the piping days of the indulgent hero, U.S. Grant. Their chief opponent, though he was a tarnished reformist candidate because of his alleged coziness with railroad promoters, was the former Speaker James G. Blaine. A third candidate, and a more authentic reformer by the probity of his conduct, was Treasury secretary John Sherman, who made a subliminal appeal to the perpetual warriors because of his iconic warrior brother, the scourge of the South, General William Tecumseh Sherman. The general summarized his career in the famous words “It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood. War is hell.” When approached about succeeding Grant as Republican presidential candidate, Sherman replied with his usual lack of ambiguity: “If nominated I will not run, and if elected I will not serve.” He would have been a more a capable executive than Grant, whom he always refused to upstage, having said: “Grant stood by me when I was crazy, and I stood by him when he was drunk, and now we stand by each other.”
The convention see-sawed between the three candidates for 35 ballots, but Blaine and Sherman withdrew in favor of Major General James Abram Garfield of Ohio (who was Sherman’s campaign manager) on the 36th ballot and he was nominated. Born in a log cabin in Ohio, a scholar and classics lecturer at Western Reserve Eclectic College, he was a widely respected general, with a distinguished combat record, especially at Shiloh, and had been Rosecrans’s chief of staff. Garfield was a somewhat radical but very scrupulous and independent-minded nine-term congressman, and was elected by the Ohio legislature to be a U.S. senator in 1880, having succeeded Blaine as minority leader of the House of Representatives. He thus ran for president as congressman and senator-elect. As a sop to the stalwarts, Garfield chose Chester A. Arthur, whom Hayes had fired as New York customs collector, for vice president. The Republican platform was a pastiche: tariff protection for industry, civil service reform, veterans’ benefits, and restrictions on Chinese immigration, all pretty superficial tangible or policy payoffs to different voting blocs.
The Democrats met at Cincinnati later in June and nominated General Winfield Scott Hancock for president and former congressman William H. English, a Democratic opponent of Buchanan and Douglas over “popular sovereignty” before the war, for vice president. The Democratic platform was practically identical to the Republican, though it sought a tariff for revenue only, as opposed to protection of American industry. Hancock was a military hero of the Mexican War and the Civil War, named after the man who was his Mexican War commander and for 15 years commanding general of the U.S. Army, and who lived to see his namesake a hero of Gettysburg and very admired corps commander of the Army of the Potomac. Hancock’s General Order 40 in 1867, restraining military intervention in Louisiana home rule, made him popular in the South, while his steadfastness as a Union commander made him a hero throughout the North. Garfield ran the first front-porch campaign and it was clearly going to be a very close election, as had been 1876. The popular vote, with no significant disputed ballots anywhere, was the closest in U.S. history: 4.453 million for Garfield to 4.444 million for Hancock, and according to some counts, the margin was as low as 2,000. The Greenback Labor Party polled 300,000 votes for James B. Weaver of Iowa, on a platform calling for protection of labor rights and issuance of increased volumes of paper money. The electoral vote was 214 for Garfield to 155 for Hancock. It could not have pushed the election to Hancock, as Weaver only made the difference in Indiana. Hancock graciously attended Garfield’s inauguration and continued to serve in the army, from which he had only taken a leave of absence, and was still commander of the Atlantic District, headquartered on Governor’s Island, New York, when he died, not yet 62, in 1886. He also served as president of the National Rifle Association. (This would be the last election won by a Republican without the adherence of California until George W. Bush in 2000.)
The main issue in Garfield’s presidency was the continuing struggle with the stalwarts. Garfield appointed Blaine secretary of state, and then affronted Conkling by appointing a Conkling opponent, William Robertson, as port collector in New York. Conkling and his fellow stalwart New York senator, Thomas Platt, blocked the appointment until May and then resigned as senators, but were not reelected by the New York legislature. This was a considerable victory for Garfield, who had spoken supportively of civil service reform in his inaugural address. Garfield had begun well, but was shot by a disgruntled office seeker, Charles J. Guiteau, on July 2 at the Washington railway station, and died on September 19.
Chester A. Arthur became president amid national misgivings that he would be a stalwart front for renewed corruption, but he determined to govern differently to what had been forecast. Most of Garfield’s cabinet retired, including Blaine, and former senator from New Jersey Frederick T Frelinghuysen became secretary of state. Both Blaine and Frelinghuysen were in the tradition of party barons who brought some domestic political influence, rather than any demonstrated foreign policy expertise, to the office. Robert Lincoln, the late president’s son, continued to serve, as he had Garfield, as sec
retary of war. Most of Arthur’s other appointees were not identifiable stalwarts either. Arthur appointed a Tariff Commission and successfully championed its support of tariff reductions; pushed through Garfield’s civil service reform, in the Pendleton Act of 1883, which required civil service examinations and apportionment of offices according to the populations of states; made a strenuous effort to separate civil service appointments from the flow of campaign funds; and supported the building of a modern, steel-hulled United States Navy, starting with three modern heavy cruisers.
It continued to be a quiet time in foreign affairs; Blaine had made various unsuccessful efforts to mediate disputes between Chile, Bolivia, and Peru, between Costa Rica and Colombia, and between Mexico and Guatemala, and his invitations to a peace conference were canceled by his successor. Arthur had a full exchange of embassies with Korea in 1882, and the United States signed the Geneva Convention on the treatment of the wounded. The U.S. agreed with the establishment of the Meridian at Greenwich in East London and with the abolition of the slave trade in the Congo in international conferences on those subjects in 1884. Pax Britannica quieted the whole world and America’s corner of the world was preternaturally quiet.
Arthur was suffering from Bright’s disease and was not well, but signified his desire to be renominated in 1884. He was passed over in favor of Blaine, but left office widely respected, even by such skeptics as Mark Twain, as an honest and capable leader. He died less than two years later, aged 56. Blaine took as his running mate a former Illinois senator, General John A. Logan (making this the 10th consecutive election and 15th of the last 16, and 21st of the 25 in the country’s history, in which a senior military officer would receive electoral votes for national office).
