Almanac When I Damn Well Feel Like It-Rutherford B. Hayes Selected Not Elected President
In a contemporary political cartoon Rutherford B. Hayes somewhat ironically rides a donkey (this was when Democrats still usually portrayed with the Tammany Tiger) labeled the Electoral Commission, over the supine body of Democratic candidate Samuel Tilden in 1877
On March 2, 1877 Republican and Democratic Congressional leaders met at Washington’s Wormley's Hotel. With a Presidential inauguration just two days away the parties were at loggerheads. It was possible that a Senate filibuster would block the final counting of the votes of the Electoral College as determined by an allegedly impartial Bipartisan Election Commission-or that in event of an extended impasse the outgoing Grant administration might resort to the Army to protect the disputed inauguration of Rutherford B. Hayes. After a day of hard-fought negotiations they entered the Compromise of 1877 which allowed Hayes to take office.
Rutherford B. Hayes is among the most obscure of U. S. Presidents. The one term Republican is remembered, if at all, for having the most impressive beard among hirsute post Civil War presidents and for having a tea-totaling wife who horrified hard drinking Congressmen, Senators, and accredited diplomats by serving lemonade at White House functions.
Hays was also the only president who not only lost the popular vote and likely the Electoral College vote as well but who by-passed the constitutionally prescribed process of settling the election in the House of Representatives. Instead an impartial Bipartisan Election Commission was selected to rule on 20 disputed Electoral College votes. The Commission handed all 20 to Hayes drawing outraged cries from Democrats of corruption.
Hayes was an Ohio politician who had risen to Major General of Volunteers in the Civil War, served with some distinction, and had been wounded in action three times. At war’s end he was elected to the House where he loyally supported Republican Reconstruction programs. He went on to be elected three times as governor of the crucial swing state. When the leading contender for the 1866 Republican nomination, Senator James G. Blaine, the Plumed Knight of reformers, was blocked through six ballots at the Republican National Convention by supporters of Grant for a third term, Hayes was tapped as the party standard bearer.
Many regarded the contest as a lost cause. His opponent was the very popular New York Governor Samuel Tilden who enjoyed a reputation for spotless honesty and reform. Tilden was also the likely beneficiary of electoral votes from the former Confederate states and was attractive to a Northern population grown weary of the expense of keeping an occupying army in the South.
As predicted, Tilden won the popular vote. And Tilden won outright 184 Electoral College votes, just one short of the majority for a clear win. Hayes trailed with 165 votes. But shortly one of those votes, from Oregon, was lost when an Elector was disqualified. The results in three Southern states, in which both parties claimed massive voter fraud by the other, were in question. Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina commanded 19 votes. Tilden needed just one of those states declared for him to win. Hayes needed to get all 19 of the Southern votes plus have his lost Oregon elector restored to squeak to a one vote victory.
To determine who actually won the disputed votes, both parties agreed to abide by the determination of a Bipartisan Election Commission. The Commission was to be made up of five Representatives, five Senators, and five Supreme Court justices. Each party had seven seats on the commission. Justice David Davis, once Abraham Lincoln’s principle political backer but now an independent respected by both parties was the fifteenth member. It was expected that he would break a predicted partisan tie on the commission and essentially decide the case.
But before Davis could take his seat on the Commission, the Democratic controlled Illinois Senate elected him to a term as United States Senator. If they thought that by doing so they could secure Davis’s vote for Tilden, they were wrong. Davis disqualified himself from sitting on the Commission due to his election. The remaining Justices were all Republicans. Justice Joseph P. Bradley, who was thought to be the least actively partisan, was selected as the final member.
The Commission met in February. Not surprisingly, the eight Republicans voted as a block and awarded all 20 disputed votes to Hayes. Hayes was assailed in the Democratic press as His Fraudulency. Senate Democrats promised a filibuster to block legislation necessary to accept the Commission’s ruling. The country was lurching headlong into a political crisis that some feared could lead to another Civil War.
In that Hotel conference Democrats wrung a bitter concession from the Republicans in exchange for agreement not to block the Commission’s recommendation-Hayes would have to end military occupation of the remaining “unreconstructed” states and withdraw troops, except for some permanent bases, from the region. Both sides knew that would essentially end Reconstruction and inevitably lead to the erosion, if not the destruction, of civil rights for Blacks.
The Republican negotiators reluctantly agreed and Hayes went along. True to the compromise, one of Hayes’s first acts in office was the executive order to an end to occupation and the return of the South to home rule. Hayes hoped to continue to enforce hard won civil rights gains through law enforcement, but the Democratic controlled Congress blocked funding of the Federal Marshals needed to enforce the law. Conciliatory gestures to the South, including giving patronage positions to Southern Democrats, failed to win any support continued participation of Blacks in state government.
Without troops or law enforcement, by the early 1890’s all of the old Confederate states had adopted new Jim Crow laws and southern Blacks were plunged into a new dark age of violent repression that would last more than 60 years.
In July of 1877 Hayes faced the violent Great Railway Strike that swept across the nation bringing commerce to a standstill. He set the tone for the next40 years of virtual open class war fare when he called out troops across the nation to smash the labor uprisings with serious loss of life.
The rest of Hayes’s single term was undistinguished. His biggest achievements were a very modest first step on Civil Service Reform, which was bitterly opposed by the corrupt Stalwart branch of his own party, and a return to the Gold Standard for American currency.
In retirement back in Ohio, Hayes was bolder in backing reforms than he had been as president. He advocated national assistance to educate students of all backgrounds and pleaded for enforcement of civil rights laws in the South. He also came to distrust the rapid concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a new elite that characterized the rapacious Gilded Age. In fact, he sometimes sounded radical at least in the private pages of his diary. He wrote:
In church it occurred to me that it is time for the public to hear that the giant evil and danger in this country, the danger which transcends all others, is the vast wealth owned or controlled by a few persons. Money is power. In Congress, in state legislatures, in city councils, in the courts, in the political conventions, in the press, in the pulpit, in the circles of the educated and the talented, its influence is growing greater and greater. Excessive wealth in the hands of the few means extreme poverty, ignorance, vice, and wretchedness as the lot of the many. It is not yet time to debate about the remedy. The previous question is as to the danger-the evil. Let the people be fully informed and convinced as to the evil. Let them earnestly seek the remedy and it will be found. Fully to know the evil is the first step towards reaching its eradication. Henry George is strong when he portrays the rottenness of the present system. We are, to say the least, not yet ready for his remedy. We may reach and remove the difficulty by changes in the laws regulating corporations, descents of property, wills, trusts, taxation, and a host of other important interests, not omitting lands and other property.
Hayes died of a heart attack at his home on January 17, 1893. His main legacy seems to be in confounding the efforts of grade school children everywhere to learn the succession of the presidents by wrote. It is, after all, real hard to keep all of those old white guys with beads sorted out.