Chip ....
try this one and see if there isn't an uncanny parallel ..
from
11/19/2000
By N.R. Kleinfield / New York Times News Service
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The election was expected to be close, as recent elections had tended to be. Still, everyone thought it would be decided on election night, not excruciating months later. No one anticipated that it would go down in history not for who won, but for how he won.
But, sure enough, on the morning after Election Day, the candidates and the country woke up to a deeply disturbing and perplexing anomaly: They had voted for a new president, but no one could tell them who it was.
The way it was
Major candidates: Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, 44, governor of Ohio and Democrat Samuel J. Tilden, 62, governor of New York.
Popular vote: Tilden won by more than 250,000.
Electoral vote: Hayes won by one, 185-184.
Disputed states: Florida, Louisiana, South Carolina and Oregon.
Count completed: On March 2, 1877, three days before Hayes' inauguration.
The year was 1876, when the nation was shaken by one of the most controversial presidential elections in its history, a distinction that the messy election of 2000 threatens to claim for itself.
In 1876, one candidate captured the majority of the popular vote and another prevailed in the electoral count. The election was so acrimonious in its aftermath, with charges of blatant fraud and intimidation, as well as of manipulation of the black vote, that many feared it would incite a second civil war.
"The political situation was never so critical as now," Georgia Congressman Ben Hill wrote to his constituents during the crisis. "Our constitutional system is on a magazine of powder, and 10,000 fools and some that are not fools are striking matches all around it."
A scandal-ridden Ulysses S. Grant, a Republican, was completing his second term as president in those waning days of Reconstruction, and there was little interest in keeping him for a third. The Republicans picked Rutherford B. Hayes, the governor of Ohio, as their candidate. The Democratic Party, out of power since 1861, was making a comeback and believed it had a strong chance with its candidate, Samuel J. Tilden, the governor of New York.
Back then, presidential candidates did not campaign. Hayes and Tilden remained inconspicuous while performing their duties as governors. But it was not the differences between the candidates that loomed large. It was the wildness of the election itself.
At first, for those yearning for a tight race, Election Day seemed a flop. The early returns pointed convincingly to Tilden. With no television back then to spew forth instantaneous results and tell voters the winner the minute after they cast ballots, results clacked in by telegraph. Newspapers would post them on their office windows, or have someone outside offering the latest information. People also knew where the party headquarters were and would congregate outside to learn of developments.
Tilden had captured the swing states of New York, Indiana, Connecticut and New Jersey. And because he assumed he could count on several Southern states, he seemed on his way to the White House. A candidate then needed 185 electoral votes to win. By midnight, Tilden had 184, and several of the yet-undecided states appeared certain to go his way.
The candidates, and the nation, went to bed believing that Tilden was the next president. Some newspapers printed stories declaring precisely that.
Histories of the election tell of a chance event that may have played a role in the outcome. The New York state Democratic chairman wished to confirm the electoral count he had tabulated, because information then was not always reliable (any television network can confirm that it still is not). He had someone contact The New York Times to ask for the paper's latest estimate of the electoral count.
John C. Reid, the managing editor of The Times, which at the time was very much supportive of the Republican Party, took that inquiry to mean that the Democrats did not believe they had the election won. He proceeded to rouse the sleeping director of the Republican campaign. All might not be lost. Telegrams were hurriedly dispatched to Republican leaders in Louisiana, South Carolina and Florida, advising them that if Hayes took those states he would win, and that they should do everything they could.
By this point, some tallies had it that Tilden stood at 184 electoral votes and Hayes at 181, counting South Carolina and Louisiana in his favor. Florida, with four electoral votes, was too close to call and could by itself decide the election.
The country awoke to absolute turmoil.
Tilden was safely ahead in the popular vote by a margin of about 250,000 votes. The Republicans, however, claimed that Hayes had by now captured Florida, giving him a total of 185 votes and a whisker of a victory.
But quickly the vote counts in Florida, Louisiana and South Carolina became the focus of sharp debate and manipulation. Fraud raged on both sides, historians agree. Boxes of ballots would turn up in bodies of water.
Black voters were pivotal. Because blacks back then overwhelmingly voted for the Republican Party, the party of Lincoln and the party of emancipation, the Republicans had unleashed aggressive campaigns to get blacks to vote, while Democrats had used physical intimidation and outright bribery to discourage black turnout.
Each party went about invalidating votes and paying bribes to "correct" ballots, resulting in disparate counts for the three Southern states in dispute. Fraud was so pervasive in those states that it is hard to say who the voters truly wanted to win.
The results in Florida were tantalizingly close. The Republicans said Hayes finished ahead by 922 votes out of about 47,000 votes cast. By Democratic count, it was Tilden by a skimpy 94 votes. In one Florida precinct that voted heavily for Tilden, the Republicans supposedly ruined ballots by smearing them with ink.
Both parties sent additional representatives to the three Southern states. A Justice Department detective was dispatched to Florida.
As bickering intensified, all of the states submitted their results to Congress. The three disputed states sent in two sets of electoral returns, each showing a different winner. Oregon also submitted two sets of returns.
The nation was in a state of utter confusion. Who was its new leader?
The Constitution was unclear on what to do. It said that the president of the Senate should open each state's vote and read it aloud. There was no mention of what to do when there were two results from the same state.
The situation with Oregon was particularly curious. Both parties agreed that Hayes had carried the state. The Democratic governor, however, learned that one of the three Hayes electors was a postmaster. According to the Constitution, a federal employee was ineligible to be an elector. The governor replaced him with a Democratic elector. That meant that Tilden would get one of Oregon's three electoral votes, giving him the final vote he needed for election even without the three contested Southern states.
But Oregon Republicans had a different answer to the problem. They accepted the postmaster's resignation as an elector. He then abruptly quit as postmaster. The Republicans promptly reappointed him to fill his own vacancy as an elector.
Colorado was another quirk of the election. Neither party made any fuss over it, but the state had only months earlier been admitted to the union. To save money, the state Legislature decided not to even bother with a presidential election. It merely appointed three electors who voted for Hayes.
Confronted with a mess of astounding proportions, Congress fervently debated the election for weeks. The year ended and still the next president had not been chosen.
On Jan. 20, 1877, a few days before the electoral votes were to be tabulated, the Electoral Commission Law was signed by Grant. It applied strictly to the electoral count of the 1876 election, and created a 15-member commission to rule on disputed electoral votes.
The commission was composed of five senators, five representatives and five Supreme Court justices. The Senate and House appointees were evenly split between the two parties. (At the time, the Democrats controlled the House and the Republicans controlled the Senate.) Two justices were appointed from each party, and these four chose the fifth and final member, Justice David Davis, who was considered a political independent. Before he could serve, however, Davis disqualified himself when the Illinois Legislature named him to a seat in the Senate. Was it coincidence or one more stroke of malevolence? Who knew?
In any event, Justice Joseph Bradley was his replacement. Though he was a Republican, the Democrats accepted him as the most independent of the remaining justices, all of whom were Republicans.
Congress met to count the electoral votes. Each of the four disputed states was referred to the special commission. The verdicts were identical. Florida? The commission voted 8-7 in favor of the Republicans. Louisiana? Again, 8-7 for the Republicans. And likewise for South Carolina and Oregon.
The votes were strictly along party lines. Bradley sided with the Republicans in each instance.
That gave Hayes 185 electoral votes and Tilden 184.
The Democrats threatened retaliation. They said they would engage in a filibuster that would prevent the completion of the electoral count until Inauguration Day came and there was no president. They vowed to congest the streets of Washington and prevent Hayes from being inaugurated. Democrats organized armed bands and, threatening "Tilden or blood," said they would physically put Tilden in the White House. There was real fear that war would break out.
Then something happened. Historians disagree on exactly what it was. Some believe that a compromise was reached at a hotel meeting between emissaries of the two parties. At that meeting, a deal was supposedly brokered that, among other things, stipulated that if Hayes became president, he would remove the remaining federal troops stationed in the South, effectively ending Reconstruction, a matter of great importance to the Southern states. That did in fact happen, but whether it was a formal quid pro quo linked to Hayes' assumption of office is unclear.
The end was now at hand. At 4 a.m. on March 2, 1877, three days before inauguration, the president of the Senate announced that Rutherford B. Hayes had won the presidency by a single electoral vote.
"The election was very significant because it meant that the Hayes presidency was discredited from the beginning," said Alan Brinkley, a professor of history at Columbia University. "He was a completely ineffective president. Hayes was known as Mr. Fraudulency throughout his presidency."
He was also known as "Old 8 to 7," an allusion to the successive Electoral Commission votes. He did not seek a second term.
The Philadelphia Inquirer contributed to this report |
