Hayes vs. Tilden

PETER: We’re going to turn now to one of the more nerve racking inauguration weekends in US history. This was the weekend of March 4, 1877 and, well–

GEORGE DOWNS: It was not clear if there was going to be one president, two presidents, no presidents.

ED: This is Greg Downs, an historian at City College, New York. He says that just three days before the inauguration, the country still wasn’t sure who would be taking the oath. Both Rutherford B. Hayes, the Republican candidate, and Samuel Tilden, the Democrat, could plausibly claim to have won the election. Rumor had it that Tilden might march on the capital with a paramilitary force. So the outgoing President, Ulysses Grant, reopened civil war forts just in case.

GEORGE DOWNS: He calls in forces from St. Louis to man the bridges into Washington DC, a city defined, as you know, by rivers.

PETER: Rutherford Hayes, meanwhile, was in Ohio preparing to travel to the capital.

GEORGE DOWNS: And so all of these wild rumors are circulating when Hayes gets on the train on March the first. And he gets many letters telling him you’re going to get killed on the way.

ED: It had been four whole months since the election, an election that everybody expected Tilden to win. So let’s pause here and see how what was supposed to be a straightforward transition got so wildly off track.

PETER: Back in November Tilden had won the popular vote. His stronghold was the South and that made sense since there were so many Democrats in the former Confederacy. But he also took some Northern states like his home state of New York. The Republicans were generally stronger in the North but they had outposts in the South, particularly among freed people. Memories of the Civil War were fresh and they were painful.

GEORGE DOWNS: Northerners are running what they come to call the bloody shirt, voters you shot, and to make it a patriotic duty to vote Republican and to associate the Democratic Party with treason.

PETER: One popular Republican slogan was not every Democrat was a rebel, but every rebel was a Democrat.

ED: But as the returns came in on election night, Hayes supporters noticed something odd. The vote was really close in Louisiana, Florida, and South Carolina. Tilden appeared to be ahead. But the margins were thin enough that Hayes might be able to eek out a victory in the electoral college if some of the votes were thrown out.

PETER: So the Republican machine sprang into action. They argued that early returns weren’t reliable because Democrats had committed widespread fraud and intimidated black voters.

GEORGE DOWNS: And they start making contact with these governors in the South and figuring out how do you determine which votes count and which votes don’t count? And in each of them, they reach out to these Republican governors in these fragile and violent southern states and they send down observers and they encourage them– in some cases, perhaps, with the kind of encouragement that comes in green, rectangular form– to throw out enough votes from precincts where there clearly was violence and fraud but to throw out conveniently enough votes to make Hayes the winner.

ED: Suddenly, it looked as if Hayes might have won the election. And this ushered in a tussle between the two houses of Congress. The Senate, controlled by Republicans, was more than happy to declare Hayes the winner. But the house, controlled by the Democrats, said not so fast, under the Constitution we have the right to decide an undecided election.

PETER: So Americans started to worry. What if the house says Tilden’s the president and the Senate says Hayes is? Tilden figured his victory was being stolen away and he geared up for a fight.

GEORGE DOWNS: He writes up a speech for the new governor of New York to deliver that says that any effort to deny a constitutionally elected president the White House will be treated as a revolution and met with force.

ED: Wow.

GEORGE DOWNS: Then he asked the governor to appoint a new head of the state militia in George McClellan. And McClellan had kept a surreptitious but active correspondence with other Democrats during the election and after that seemed to indicate that he’s thinking about, or at least investigating, how he would build up an Army in support of Tilden.

ED: Because he’d been dreaming of such a thing throughout the Civil War.

GEORGE DOWNS: That’s right. And he would ride in on a white horse.

ED: Exactly. But before our listeners write us and say, that George McClellan. Let me just go ahead and say, yes, the same George McClellan who’d run for president under the Democratic banner in 1864 and who had, as you just said, Greg, dreamed of some way of sort of saving the Union from the tyrant of Lincoln. And so now his chance, 12 years later, is sort of representing itself. I can’t wait to hear how this turns out. Then what happens?

GEORGE DOWNS: So he’s writing. We only have little bits and pieces of this correspondence. And some of it what we get is we get from people who are writing back to him saying, I can’t believe what you just wrote to me. And you think as a historian, what did he just write to him? But you can see him talking strategies, talking tactics.

ED: But just before the governor was to name McClellan to lead New York’s militia, a friend of Tilden’s named John Bigelow rushed after him. Bigelow said, please, don’t do this yet.

GEORGE DOWNS: And the governor says why? And Bigelow says because that’ll be the end of the country, that what you want to do is you want to wait until it’s time to fight and then name a fighter. But if you name a fighter now, we’re not going to be able to put it back in the box. And that night Bigelow writes in his diary this sort of pain as he contemplates that by the next July 4, there may be no presidency, there may be no country again.

Many people, knowing bits and pieces and the way that things feed through gossip, think that Tilden is going to step out of his mansion in New York City, call out the militias along the coast, seize the customs house– the customs house is the primary generator of revenue for the federal government– and the bank. And he’s going to establish himself as a separate government in New York City, this old vision, this vision that had been floated in the Civil War by the mayor of New York, of New York as the capital of a sort of disappeared republic, and that he might be able to muster enough people to chase Hayes out to the Midwest and this sort of Civil War instead of north, south, one between east and west.

PETER: As best we can gather today, Tilden never intended to declare himself president in New York.

GEORGE DOWNS: He would go much farther than that, which is to say he would march into Washington DC and stage a counter inauguration in DC. And if he was captured by the Army and executed as a traitor by court martial, he understood that that’s what it could lead to.

ED: But, and this is crucial, he would only take that drastic step if the house was willing to stand behind them. And at this point, the house got cold feet, fearing violence. The president of the Senate didn’t want to touch the issue either. So Congress figured out a way to, basically, hand the problem off.

GEORGE DOWNS: And so just like now we create a super commission to resolve the debt, whenever there’s some problem that Congress can’t get its mind around politically, they assign it to the sort of old wise heads. Well, they do that.

ED: And it worked out back then unlike in our time, huh?

GEORGE DOWNS: Unlike now, right?

PETER: That super committee started to deliberate in late January. By the beginning of March there is still no official decision, which brings us back to where we started. Hayes was on that train to DC. Rumors were flying. And the election was still in doubt.

ED: Finally, after a couple of days of foot dragging by Democrats, Congress rubber stamped the commission’s decision. The election was decided. Hayes had 185 electoral votes, Tilden, 184. About six hours later, Hayes’s train rolled into DC and the long saga was over.

PETER: That Sunday, Hayes was sworn in. On Monday, he delivered his inaugural address to a peaceful crowd of onlookers. Here’s what he said at the end.

RUTHERFORD HAYES: It has been reserved for a government of the people, where the right of suffrage is universal, to give to the world the first example in history of a great nation hushing its party tumults to yield the issue of the contest to adjustment according to the forms of law.

ED: So, Peter, that’s some convoluted 19th century language. You want to give us a translation? What’s Hayes doing here?

PETER: Well, this is this moment– call it a locker room moment– when Hayes is telling the Americans, hey, team, we’re OK. Everything’s going to be all right. This is his opportunity to reaffirm the founding myth, this is a great country, a government of the people. So even when the people manifestly fail to reach a solution through their parties, even when the Constitution, that beautiful machine which is supposed to guarantee democratic outcomes, manifestly fails, well, we got to tell ourselves that we have triumphed. We have made it through this rough passage.

BRIAN: Peter, this is like the babysitter knowing the parents are coming back. Let’s put the living room back together.

PETER: That’s a nice image, Brian. The Union has been preserved. Democracy has redeemed itself yet again. And the Constitution, this beautiful machine, has come to a final decision. Of course, a literary critic would say, well, that’s just the opposite of what happened, wouldn’t they, Ed?

ED: They would because it’s hard to find a victory in this for the story of democracy. Two reasons. One, really, what kind of deals were cut that would allow this to work out? All the way from the courthouses down in Louisiana and Florida and South Carolina up to the people supposedly counting the votes to what the senators and congressmen are doing, what kind of lobbyists are involved? So there’s that. Just the form of democracy itself seems to be compromised.

But then there’s also what happened. He’s talking about universal suffrage. And what he means there is that the fruit of the Civil War and of the 15th amendment, recent history that African Americans can vote. And as a result of this election and what makes people cynical about this is that Hayes removes the troops from those courthouses in those three states where reconstruction had still been in place and African Americans, basically, are on their own for the next 100 years, that they would never have the power of the federal government until the civil rights struggle coming back in to protect the rights of African Americans.

PETER: And democracy shrinks as result, the number of people who are really counted as Americans.

ED: Peter, you apparently have not listened to Rutherford B. Hayes’s inaugural speech because what he is saying is that this is the triumph of democracy. But, lest I be cynical, let me recall that as much pain and betrayal of democracy as this brought, at least it was not a renewal of the Civil War. It was not blood in the streets. There were not coup d’etat. So by that standard, which I think by the standard of world history is a meaningful one, this isn’t the worst outcome you could have had for the nation as a whole, though it’s hard to imagine a much worse outcome for African Americans.

BRIAN: hosts, it seems to me that on all of these inaugurations we’ve really alluded to the fact that they provide a window into just what’s going on during these difficult times. But what we haven’t asked ourselves is how much of the landscape can we see through that window? What we don’t hear and we don’t see through this particular window, especially through the flowery rhetoric of Hayes, is what is going to happen to the suffrage of African Americans.

ED: You know, and it’s important to say– and I really feel passionate about this– that African Americans, just because they were abandoned by the white Republicans, did not quit trying to vote. For the next 20 years they did everything they could to maintain the suffrage that had been so dearly bought. So, Brian, your metaphor about the window is exactly right. It lets us look down Pennsylvania Avenue. But you can’t see all of America from there.