American Colossus: The Triumph of Capitalism, 1865-1900

by H. W. Brands

  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 ti
me, 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

  Chapter 14

  LIVES OF THE PARTIES