The Other Selected President
GRAFF, HENRY F.
The Other Selected President Fraud of the Century: Rutherford B. Hayes, Samuel Tilden, and the Stolen Election of 1876 By Roy Morris Jr. Simon & Schuster. 311pp. $27.00. Reviewed by Henry...
...editor, "The Presidents: A Reference History" When Americans gaze at the portraits of the Presidents arranged in order of succession, they know that the visages staring out at them are each in their ordained place, as if divinely installed...
...His enemies would forever know him as "Old Eight to Seven," or simply "His Fraudulency...
...Its fascinating narrative reminds us that those pictures represent men who, except for Washington, are there because they chanced to win a climactic political tournament...
...Morris sees him as an "overachiever...
...He rose from the rankofmajorto major general with the 23rd Ohio Infantry, an achievement he drew on to become a winning politician...
...Tilden started out as an acolyte of Martin Van Buren and became an ardent freesoiler...
...He is not a professional historian but his obvious zest for politics and his skillful use of secondary sources—notably the books of Ari Hogenboom and the late C. Vann Woodward—are combined here in a first-rate account of this famous disputed election...
...His preparation for life included attendance at Kenyon College in Ohio plus his graduation in 1845 from Harvard Law School...
...Samuel Jones Tilden, the Democrats' man, also loved books...
...He was a natural candidate for the Presidency in 1876, and in a dogfight with James G. Blaine, among others, won his party's nomination...
...I loved her as only a brother can love a sister who is perfect," he said, calling her his "closest confidante...
...Another distinguishing characteristic was his insistent hypochondria...
...Who but Abraham Lincoln the 16th...
...Elected Governor of Ohio three times, Hayes told his uncle this was a satisfying position: "Not too much hard work and plenty of time to read, good society, etc...
...The inescapable awareness that a generation of youths had been wantonly sacrificed kept open the gaping wound suffered by the body politic...
...But the Democrat, who might have opened a new time of violence by taking the oath of office, coolly declared that the resolution "created no warrant of authority.' The passage of time has given the disputed 1876 election new coloration...
...When the Democratic Party nominated Tilden for President in 1876, he was 62 and looked 10 years older...
...Tilden, meanwhile, was reconciled to his fate, and without bitterness kept undiminished his faith in the institutions of the republic...
...This legacy helped create the magnificent reference division of the New York Public Library that enables people like Morris and this reviewer to explore the American past, and most significant, to "inquire into the origin of things...
...Nor would the Republicans permit the election to be thrown into the House of Representatives, where Presidents are chosen when no candidate receives an Electoral College majority, because the Democrats were in control there and would have elected Tilden...
...When Hayes left office in 1881, having fulfilled his promise to serve only one term, he was apopularman, much admiredforhis Administration...
...Good God, has it come to this...
...The day before Hayes was inaugurated, the House passed a resolution declaring that Tilden had been "duly elected President of the United States...
...On election night it appeared that Tilden, with 300,000 more popular votes than Hayes, was the victor...
...Joseph Pulitzer, publisher of the New York World, was dismayed: "Hayes has never stolen...
...Morris relates the battles for the disputed states in infinite, perhaps excessive, detail...
...The Vice President, who would normally have performed this duty, had recently died...
...Republicans argued that Democratic victories in the South had resulted from intimidating the freedmen and keeping them from the polls...
...The year 1876, then, was a heady one for a Presidential election, and the turmoil that marked it seems in retrospect hardly surprising...
...Rutherford Birchard Hayes was a man who read books, and the country has not had many such in the White House...
...The young historian Henry Adams labeled him "a thirdrate nonentity...
...His father died before Rutherford was born and his relationship with his sister, Fanny—much commented upon by his biographers, although not by Morris—was remarkably intense...
...Hayes' wife, devoted to temperance, would be known as "Lemonade Lucy" for the abstemious household she presided over...
...Despite the author's contention, the picture he paints of the two antagonists, to this reader at least, makes Hayes a more attractive candidate...
...But he had won only 184 Electoral College votes, leaving him one shy...
...Each had rival Democratic and Republican boards of election certifying the vote...
...But unlike so many others of this bent, he did not move over to the Republican Party...
...The sequence of events was extraordinary...
...A mild stroke had given him a drooping eyelid...
...It did not matter that he spoke haltingly, since in his day the burden of campaigning fell upon surrogates...
...Moreover, Hayes showed an eagerness for the job...
...In dispute were the outcomes in three Southern states still under Radical Republican governments —South Carolina, Florida and Louisiana...
...Morris quotes a Democratic wag who joked that Hayes "has done so well that I sometimes almost wish he had been elected...
...A lifelong bachelor, he was a highly successful lawyer who made millions representing railroad interests...
...No wonder he was "Simpering Sammy" to his critics...
...Behind the scenes, a number of "understandings" had been reached with the Hayes forces —that all Federal troops would finally be withdrawn from the South, that Hayes would appoint a Southerner to his Cabinet, and that funds would be made available for railroad construction in the South...
...Hayes required all three...
...His chief spokesman was Abram S. Hewitt, shortly to become Mayor of New York—whose 85year-old father-in-law, philanthropist Peter Cooper, was on the ballot heading the Greenback Party ticket...
...They split along party lines and Hayes was chosen the next President...
...He died in 1886, leaving his fortune for the establishment of a free library in the City of New York...
...What ensued was a struggle neither Hayes nor Tilden expected or controlled...
...The contest was in truth not about them at all—for both lacked a popular following—but about the future of the Union, particularly the reconstruction process as it was then understood...
...This book about the making of the President in 1876-77 should encourage people to defy the injunction...
...Equally important, the altered race relations that emancipation had brought offered evidence daily that a new social order was at hand to which politics had to adjust...
...The viewers seem to heed Pascal's stern command: "Never inquire into the origin of things...
...We can never know whether Tilden, who in Morris' view was defrauded of victory, would have served the country better than Hayes did...
...In any event, it needs to be remembered that during the postbellum era only men enjoyed suffrage, and the outlook of millions of them was annealed in the Civil War fires still smoldering North and South...
...Reviewed by Henry F. Graff Professor emeritus of history, Columbia...
...He stood chiefly for honesty in government...
...Who else but Andrew Jackson could have been seventh in line...
...I hope to enjoy the satisfaction of voting against him...
...The details of the serpentine path of intrigue and infighting that the encounter took are entrancing...
...When Hayes died he was interred at his Spiegel Grove estate in Fremont, Ohio, now proudly touted as the site of the first Presidential library...
...No contest, however, not even the Al Gore-George W. Bush entanglement in 2000, matches the drama of the one that pitted Rutherford B. Hayes and Samuel J. Tilden against each other...
...He needed the vote of just one of the disputed states...
...As in 2000, the Republicans were better organized for the end-game fight than the Democrats...
...The Constitution provided no answer to the question of which set of certified returns must be counted when the Republican president pro tem of the Senate opened them...
...In the intoxicating post-Civil War days of the spoilsmen and robber barons, he was a reformer against the tide...
...In the event, an Electoral Commission was formed consisting of eight Republican andseven Democrats...
...Though the story is not new, no one has told it better than Roy Morris Jr...
...The Civil War allowed him to show he was a leader...
...History is not a movie studio capable of retakes and remakes, so it is futile to speculate about the might-have-been— what Franklin D. Roosevelt called "iffy" questions...
...In his political activities as in his work, he was methodical, secretive and obsessively attentive to the fine points of everything...
...Interested in politico, she had wooed her husband from the Whig Party and he became a committed Republican...
...He had a powerful hand in destroying the Tweed Ring in New York City and—after his 1874 election as Governor—helped to do in the Canal Ring, a corrupt cabal that cheated on its contracts to repair upstate waterways...
...Tilden can only be described as supine...
Vol. 86 • January 2003 • No. 1
