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Date Posted: 12:02:50 04/03/03 Thu
Author: Weird_Enigma
Author Host/IP: 209.252.119.21
Subject: Nation's worst election fraud not Bush-Gore

Nation's worst election fraud not Bush-Gore

Hayes-Tilden in 1876 made 2000 race look like a purse-snatching
MICHAEL KENNEY
New York Times News Service

FRAUD OF THE CENTURY: Rutherford B. Hayes, Samuel Tilden, and the Stolen Election of 1876

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By Roy Morris Jr. Simon and Schuster. 311 Pages. $27.

With all due regard for Al Gore, Florida's election officials and the Supreme Court, the 2000 election was a handbag-snatching charge compared to the election of 1876, whose outcome was like a bank heist.

And in Roy Morris Jr.'s authoritative account, "Fraud of the Century," the maneuvering in which three states almost certainly carried by the Democrat, Samuel Tilden, were awarded to the Republican, Rutherford B. Hayes, has the immediacy of the last election. It was political drama of the first rank, more embedded in the conflicts of the day than was the 2000 election. And the impact was even more damaging -- at least symbolically, Morris writes.

By 1876, he says, "the inevitable waning of Reconstruction was accepted," not only in the South, but even in the North. The Democrats, united by a "thirst for revenge," seemed to have a likely winner in Tilden, the New York governor and a cerebral political reformer who stood in sharp contrast to the scandal-tainted Grant administration.

The Republicans had a stable of second-tier candidates. With a home-state advantage at the Cincinnati convention, the nomination went to Hayes, the Ohio governor and a Civil War general. The campaign itself was pretty much unremarkable. The two parties, Morris writes, agreed on the major issues, including reform after Grant administration scandals and safeguarding the civil rights of blacks. And neither candidate seemed "likely to disturb the national mood."

Tilden and Hayes both went to bed on election night certain that Tilden had won. But Morris writes that the editor of The New York Times, a Republican stalwart, John C. Reid, was not so sure and persuaded the state's Republican chairman to telegraph party leaders in undecided states such as South Carolina, Louisiana and Florida not to concede. This left Tilden just one electoral vote short of victory. Those hold-the-line telegrams set the stage for maneuverings that would continue for four months, right up to the eve of the inauguration.

In Florida, "visiting statesmen," party leaders and political operatives -- and 12 companies of federal troops -- quickly headed for Tallahassee, where a Republican-controlled canvassing board would consider challenges to Tilden's unofficial 91-vote lead.

Vote-changing was widespread, as were the reporting of favorable results and the withholding of unfavorable ones. Evidence of fraud troubled even one of the Republican visitors, Lew Wallace, Union general (and "Ben-Hur" author). "I scarcely even passed a week under such depression of spirits," he wrote his wife. "It is terrible to see the extent to which all classes go in their determination to win. Conscience offers no restraint. Nothing is so common as the resort to perjury, unless it is to violence."

Hours before the Electoral College met, the Florida canvassing board reported a 924-vote victory for Hayes, obtained, Morris writes, by "throwing out more than twice that many votes for Tilden."

The standoff continued; it would be resolved by Congress. But the Republican-controlled Senate and the Democratic House passed the matter along to a 15-member Election Commission. When the one member regarded as independent, a Supreme Court justice, resigned and was replaced by another justice, a highly partisan Republican, the result could be in little doubt.

Meanwhile, Hayes was reaching out to Southern Democrats. One editor reported having told Hayes: "If we felt that you were friendly to us, we would not make that desperate personal fight to keep you out that certainly we will make if you are not friendly."

More important to the South than Tilden's fate was the election of Democratic governors in the three disputed states -- including Confederate cavalry leader Wade Hampton in South Carolina.

One Southern newspaper editor put it thus: "We have got to see that whatever horse loses, our horse wins." Newspaper reports that Hayes had made "an explicit disavowal of Republican carpetbagger regimes" seemed to assure local Democratic victories.

And that raises the question of the stolen election's long-term impact. The "popular legend" that Hayes's election ended Reconstruction "is simply incorrect," Morris writes. That had already begun when President Ulysses S. Grant refused to send troops to intervene in the 1875 Mississippi state election. But the withdrawal of federal troops from Southern state capitals during 1877 "represented the symbolic end of Reconstruction."

And real or symbolic, "the end of Reconstruction would prove to have catastrophic and far-reaching effects." As one black Louisianan put it: "The whole South had got back into the hands of the very men that held us as slaves." It would take almost a century for that legacy to be undone.


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Michael Kenney reviews books for The Boston Globe.

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