Roy Jr. Morris - Fraud of the Century: Rutherford B. Hayes, Samuel Tilden, and the Stolen Election of 1876
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- Book:Fraud of the Century: Rutherford B. Hayes, Samuel Tilden, and the Stolen Election of 1876
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Fraud of the Century: Rutherford B. Hayes, Samuel Tilden, and the Stolen Election of 1876: summary, description and annotation
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In this major work of popular history and scholarship, acclaimed historian and biographer Roy Morris, Jr., tells the extraordinary story of how, in Americas centennial year, the presidency was stolen, the Civil War was almost reignited, and black Americans were consigned to nearly ninety years of legalized segregation in the South.
The bitter 1876 contest between Ohio Republican governor Rutherford B. Hayes and New York Democratic governor Samuel J. Tilden is the most sensational, ethically sordid, and legally questionable presidential election in American history. The first since Lincolns in 1860 in which the Democrats had a real chance of recapturing the White House, the election was in some ways the last battle of the Civil War, as the two parties fought to preserve or overturn what had been decided by armies just eleven years earlier.
Riding a wave of popular revulsion at the numerous scandals of the Grant administration and a sluggish economy, Tilden received some 260,000 more votes than his opponent. But contested returns in Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina ultimately led to Hayess being declared the winner by a specially created, Republican-dominated Electoral Commission after four tense months of political intrigue and threats of violence. President Grant took the threats seriously: he ordered armed federal troops into the streets of Washington to keep the peace.
Morris brings to life all the colorful personalities and high drama of this most remarkable -- and largely forgotten -- election. He presents vivid portraits of the bachelor lawyer Tilden, a wealthy New York sophisticate whose passion for clean government propelled him to the very brink of the presidency, and of Hayes, a family man whose midwestern simplicity masked a cunning political mind. We travel to Philadelphia, where the Centennial Exhibition celebrated Americas industrial might and democratic ideals, and to the nations heartland, where Republicans waged a cynical but effective bloody shirt campaign to tar the Demo-crats, once again, as the party of disunion and rebellion.
Morris dramatically recreates the suspenseful events of election night, when both candidates went to bed believing Tilden had won, and a one-legged former Union army general, Devil Dan Sickles, stumped into Republican headquarters and hastily improvised a devious plan to subvert the election in the three disputed southern states. We watch Hayes outmaneuver the curiously passive Tilden and his supporters in the days following the election, and witness the late-night backroom maneuvering of party leaders in the nations capital, where democracy itself was ultimately subverted and the will of the people thwarted.
Fraud of the Century presents compelling evidence that fraud by Republican vote-counters in the three southern states, and especially in Louisiana, robbed Tilden of the presidency. It is at once a masterful example of political reporting and an absorbing read.
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Praise for Fraud of the Century
A rollicking portrait of electoral chicanery past. Political junkies bored by the present GOP monopoly or just seeking escape from unsettling current events are advised to join Morris in 1876, when his Fraudulency, Rutherfraud B. Hayes, triumphed over Centennial Sam Tilden to extend post-bellum Republican rule.
The Baltimore Sun
[A] historical account given in gorgeous detail that is hard to stop reading. Morris is a splendid historian and writer and regales the reader with stories of the scheming and plotting that surround any presidential campaign and election.
San Francisco Chronicle
A riveting political history.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Fraud of the Century is an excellent bookthoughtful and well researched. It may be the last word on Americas most embarrassing election.
The Washington Times
Reading Roy Morriss Fraud of the Century convinced me that history repeats itself. His spirited account of the disputed Hayes-Tilden election of 1876 is as gripping as the newspaper stories we all read after the Bush-Gore contest. This lively history is a warning of the fragility of our political system, as well as a commentary on the basic strength of our democratic institutions. Fraud of the Century is first-rate narrative history.
David Herbert Donald, author of Lincoln
The similarities between the 2000 and 1876 elections are strikingright down to the temperament of the candidates. Morris fine, objective account of the 1876 election debacle is an informative, insightful and, yes, entertaining act of memory.
The Denver Post
Authoritative. Fraud of the Century has the immediacy of the last election.
The Boston Globe
A fascinating narrative. No contest, not even the Gore-Bush entanglement in 2000, matches the drama of the one that pitted Hayes and Tilden against each other. The details of the serpentine path of intrigue and infighting that the encounter took are entrancing. No one has told the story better than Roy Morris. A first-rate account.
The New Leader
A revealing, dramatic, and timely account of a presidential election that proved to be a crossroads event in American history.
Michael Beschloss, author of The Conquerors: Roosevelt, Truman
and the Destruction of Hitlers Germany, 1941-1945
Fraud of the Century is riveting and timely. Roy Morris reminds us of historys long reach and of how contemporary events rarely are novel and unprecedented. A fine read and a compelling story.
Jeffry D. Wert, author of Gettysburg, Day Three
Respected biographer Morris reconstructs in amazing detail a presidential election that profaned the rule of law and nearly rekindled the Civil War. One of the nations darkest chapters, brilliantly exhumed and analyzed with due attention to its obvious contemporary relevance.
Kirkus Reviews (starred)
Morris has an eye for detail and a lively writing style that make this highly detailed, first-rate work of history read more like a whodunnit than a historical examination.
Library Journal (starred)
For those who think the election of George W. Bush over Al Gore in 2000 represented the nadir of American electoral politics, Morris provides some much-needed historical perspective. Well researched and written in clear prose. Morriss account of the 1876 election reminds us that character can triumph over politics.
Publishers Weekly
Dense with well-documented historical color and insights into a very different age. If former Vice President Al Gore had learned from Mr. Tildens missteps, history might not have repeated itself.
New York Law Journal
OTHER BOOKS BY ROY MORRIS, JR.
The Better Angel: Walt Whitman in the Civil War
Ambrose Bierce: Alone in Bad Company
Sheridan: The Life and Wars of General Phil Sheridan
This book is dedicated to my father,
Roy Morris, and to the memory of my mother,
Margaret Brew Coode Morris (1922-1999),
two more members of the Greatest Generation.
SIMON & SCHUSTER
Rockefeller Center
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
Copyright 2003 by Roy Morris, Jr.
All rights reserved,
including the right of reproduction
in whole or in part in any form.
S IMON & S CHUSTER and colophon are registered trademarks
of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:
Morris, Roy.
Fraud of the century : Rutherford B. Hayes, Samuel Tilden,
and the stolen election of 1876 / Roy Morris, Jr.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
p. cm.
1. PresidentsUnited StatesElection1876. 2. Contested elections
United StatesHistory19th century. 3. ElectionsCorrupt practices
United StatesHistory19th century. 4. Political corruptionUnited States
History19th century. 5. Hayes, Rutherford Birchard, 1822-1893.
6. Tilden, Samuel J. (Samuel Jones), 1814-1886. 7. Presidential
candidatesUnited StatesBiography. I. Title.
E680 .M85 2003
324.973082dc21 2002036507
ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-8545-9
ISBN-10: 1-4165-8545-1
H ISTORY, SAID KARL MARX , repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce. The American presidential election of 2000, with its hanging chads, butterfly ballots, flummoxed oldsters, and pop-eyed Florida election officials, certainly qualifies as farcical, in its procedures if not necessarily its outcome. But its historical parallels to another disputed presidential election, one that took place on the same date 124 years earlier, call to mind the first part of Marxs aphorism as well. The 1876 contest between Republican nominee Rutherford B. Hayes and Democratic nominee Samuel J. Tilden also involved the state of Florida, and it, too, ultimately was decided by the vote of a single Republican member of the U.S. Supreme Court. As with the 2000 election, there were charges of fraud, intimidation, lost ballots, and racism. Hordes of political operatives descended hungrily on the state, while the nation waited, anxiously if not breathlessly, for the winning candidate to be determined. When it was over, four months after election day, the candidate who probably had lost the election in Florida and definitely had lost the popular vote nationwide nevertheless was declared the winner, not just of Floridas electoral votes but of the presidency itself.
But if the 2000 election was something of a farce, the 1876 election was nothing less than a tragedy. Ironically, in a year that saw the United States celebrating the centennial of its birth, the American political system nearly broke apart under the powerful oppositional pull of party politics, personal ambitions, and lingering sectional animosities. The result was a singularly sordid presidential election, perhaps the most bitterly contested in the nations history, and one whose eventual winner was decided not in the nations multitudinous polling booths but in a single meeting room inside the Capitol, not by the American people en masse but by a fifteen-man Electoral Commission that was every bit as partisan and petty as the shadiest ward heeler in New York City or the most unreconstructed Rebel in South Carolina. It was an election that did little credit to anyone, except perhaps its ultimate loser.
In a larger sense, there were no real winners in 1876. Rutherford B. Hayes did eventually take the presidential oath of officenot once but twice, in the space of three days, as events transpiredbut in both personal and political terms he was as much a loser as the man he defeated. The shameless ways in which Samuel Tildens electoral triumph eventually was overturned so compromised Hayes that, had he not already declared that he would serve only one term as president, he still would have been virtually a lame duck from the day he took office. As it was, his legal and moral title to the presidency was never accepted as legitimate by at least half the country, and he has been tarred ever since with such unflattering nicknames as His Fraudulency, the Great Usurper, and Rutherfraud B. Hayes.
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