426 Chapter 15 Reconstruction and the South
the Court and the commission. Since independents
were rare even on the Supreme Court, no neutral
justice was available to replace him. The vacancy
went to Associate Justice Joseph P. Bradley of New
Jersey, a Republican.
Evidence presented before the commission
revealed a disgraceful picture of corruption. On the
one hand, in all three disputed states Democrats had
clearly cast a majority of the votes; on the other, it was
unquestionable that many blacks had been forcibly
prevented from voting.
In truth, both sides were shamefully corrupt. The
governor of Louisiana was reported willing to sell his
state’s electoral votes for $200,000. The Florida elec-
tion board was supposed to have offered itself to
Tilden for the same price. “That seems to be the stan-
dard figure,” Tilden remarked ruefully.
The Democrats had some hopes that Justice
Bradley would be sympathetic to their case, for he
was known to be opposed to harsh Reconstructionsome chicanery involving railroad securities. Instead
they nominated Governor Rutherford B. Hayes of
Ohio, a former general with an untarnished reputa-
tion. The Democrats picked Governor Samuel J.
Tilden of New York, a wealthy lawyer who had
attracted national attention for his part in breaking up
the Tweed Ring in New York City.
In November early returns indicated that Tilden
had carried New York, New Jersey, Connecticut,
Indiana, and all the southern states, including
Louisiana, South Carolina, and Florida, where
Republican regimes were still in control. This seemed
to give him 203 electoral votes to Hayes’s 165, and a
popular plurality in the neighborhood of 250,000
out of more than 8 million votes cast. However,
Republican leaders had anticipated the possible loss
of Florida, South Carolina, and Louisiana and were
prepared to use their control of the election machin-
ery in those states to throw out sufficient Democratic
ballots to alter the results if doing so would change
the national outcome. Realizing that the electoral
votes of those states were exactly enough to elect
their man, they telegraphed their henchmen on the
scene, ordering them to go into action. The local
Republicans then invalidated Democratic ballots in
wholesale lots and filed returns showing Hayes the
winner. Naturally the local Democrats protested vig-
orously and filed their own returns.
The Constitution provides (Article II, Section 1)
that presidential electors must meet in their respective
states to vote and forward the results to “the Seat of
the Government.” There, it adds, “the President of
the Senate shall, in the Presence of the Senate and
House of Representatives, open all the Certificates,
and the Votes shall then be counted.” But who was to
do the counting? The House was Democratic, the
Senate Republican; neither would agree to allow the
other to do the job. On January 29, 1877, scarcely a
month before inauguration day, Congress created an
electoral commission to decide the disputed cases.
The commission consisted of five senators (three
Republicans and two Democrats), five representatives
(three Democrats and two Republicans), and five jus-
tices of the Supreme Court (two Democrats, two
Republicans, and one “independent” judge, David
Davis). Since it was a foregone conclusion that the
others would vote for their party no matter what the
evidence, Davis would presumably swing the balance
in the interest of fairness.
But before the commission met, the Illinois leg-
islature elected Davis senator! He had to resign from
Republican (Hayes)
Democratic (Tilden)
TerritoriesELECTORAL VOTE
TOTAL: 369POPULAR VOTE
TOTAL: 8,340,783MINOR
1%
93,895187650%
185
50%
184
48%
4,036,298
51%
4,300,590The Republicans Gain the Presidency, the White South Loses
the Union Army, 1877By 1876 white Democrats had regained
political control in much of the South, giving Tilden 203 electoral
votes to the Republican Hayes’s 185. But Republican election
officials in South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana invalidated
thousands of Democratic votes, which seemingly gave the
election to Tilden. In 1877 a congressional commission finalized a
deal giving the presidency to Hayes, who would withdraw the
Union army from the South.