The Presidency of Ulysses S. Grant was marked with scandal and corruption.
As a result, going into the 1876 Presidential Election, Republicans and Democrats both looked for Washington outsiders with reputations for honesty. In that vein, Rutherford B. Hayes and Samuel J. Tilden had a lot in common.
Both men were known as reformers. Hayes, as governor of Ohio, helped secure the passage of the 15th Amendment, which gave African-Americans the right to vote. Hayes also brought about reforms in the state penitentiary, welfare, and educational systems.
Meanwhile, Tilden rose to prominence by destroying the corrupt Tweed Ring that controlled New York City. Later, as governor of New York, Tilden cemented his reputation as an enemy to corrupt political machines by breaking up the Canal Ring, a bipartisan group that got rich off fraudulent canal repair bills.
As the contest got underway, Hayes made an interesting campaign promise. He expressed a desire to allow Southern states “local self-government” despite fears that this action would allow states to effectively nullify the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments.
Grant was already starting to withdraw federal troops from the South, but Reconstruction was still, technically, in effect. Nevertheless, Democrats had seized back control of enough states in the South so that they knew they had a legitimate shot at winning the White House in 1876 — something they hadn’t done since before the Civil War. That, plus Grant’s widespread unpopularity, put Tilden on the precipice of finally breaking that losing streak.
On Election Day, Tilden won the popular vote and had amassed 184 electoral votes, one short of the majority, to Hayes’ 166, with Louisiana, South Carolina, and Florida still undecided. There was also one contested electoral vote in Oregon. Considering Tilden had won most of the South and Louisiana had gone Democratic as recently as 1868, it seemed a matter of time before he clinched the White House. Even Hayes privately conceded that the election was lost.
But then everything changed, setting off a bizarre set of circumstances that threw the country into its most serious Constitutional crisis since the Civil War.
Republican official William Chandler of New Hampshire and New York Times managing editor John Reid figured out that if Hayes took all of the disputed states, then he would have 185 electoral votes, giving him the Presidency by a single electoral vote. Thus, the two men telegrammed Zachariah Chandler, asking the National Republican Party chairman to get local Republican government officials in South Carolina, Louisiana, and Florida to hold their states for Hayes.
Because Republicans were still in power in those three states, Chandler hoped that party officials could “canvass” the returns and recount the votes in a way to allow Hayes to triumph, thus giving him the requisite 185 electoral votes. Democrats counter-attacked, declaring victory in state elections, setting up their own governments, and scrutinizing the Republican canvasses. As a result, both parties certified their own set of election results, leaving the winner of the election in doubt.
Unsure of how to proceed — the Constitution addressed what happened if neither candidate got a majority, but was silent in cases where certified electoral results were in doubt — Congress established a special bipartisan commission to investigate the disputed returns, whose findings would be binding unless both houses of Congress voted to reject them.
The Commission consisted of five Senators, five Congressman, and five Supreme Court Justices, seven of whom were Democrats and seven of whom were Republicans. The fifteenth member was supposed to be Associate Justice David Davis, an independent. However, Davis was elected to serve in the Senate by the Democrat-controlled Illinois state legislature, and in his place, Justice Joseph Bradley, a Republican, served on the Commission instead.
Bradley was picked because he was seen as the most independent-minded Justice after Davis. Nevertheless, Republicans were hopeful once they saw that they had the balance of power on the commission. Indeed, Hayes’ son, Webb, told his father that “the bets are five to one that the next president will be Hayes.” Hayes himself was cautiously optimistic, and he began considering cabinet members while formulating a policy for Southern relations.
Sure enough, Bradley sided with the other 7 Republicans, giving them an 8-7 majority. Hayes won all of the disputed returns and was awarded the Electoral College by a single vote. Adopting, almost verbatim, the arguments put forth by the Republicans before the Commission, Bradley held that each state had a “just right to have the entire and exclusive control of its own vote for the Chief Magistrate and head of the republic, without any interference on the part of any other State, acting either separately or in Congress with others.”
Bradley also held that Congress could not look into the State’s appointment of electors. Such an action would “tak[e] it out of the hands of the State, to which it properly belongs. Of course, this did not mean that Congress had to simply sit back and accept efforts to defraud the electoral process. However, Bradley held that it was the business of the State to prevent fraud, not Congress. The canvass board had the power to review the electoral process for fraud, but after that, the discretion of Congress was confined to counting the votes, not inquiring as to their validity.
“Rutherfraud”
That wasn’t the end, though. Democrats planned on filibustering the vote to adopt the report. If they managed to delay things until March 4, the Electoral Commission’s mandate would expire and, under then-existing laws, the House could call for new elections.
To try and avert this, Republicans and Southern Democrats met at the Wormley Hotel in Washington D.C. on the evening of February 26, 1877. Republicans wanted the Southern Democrats to help break the promised filibuster, thereby ensuring the election of Hayes based upon the findings of the Commission. Southern Democrats, however, wanted certain concessions, including aid for internal improvements, a seat in the cabinet, a subsidy for the Texas and Pacific Railway which would connect the South with the West, and a voice in the distribution of federal patronage in the South.
In addition to receiving help in breaking the filibuster, the Republicans also extracted promises from the Southerners to endorse James Garfield, an Ohio Republican and Hayes ally, for Speaker of the House, and to guarantee political equality and civil rights for blacks upon the imminent withdrawal of the remaining federal troops in the South. It was this last promise that eventually gave the conference its legendary status as the point in time in which Reconstruction finally ended.
According to several historians, however, such a viewpoint is misguided and overstates the importance of this conference. Nevertheless, the myth of the Wormley Bargain lives on. As Roy Morris, Jr. wrote in Fraud of the Century: Rutherford B. Hayes, Samuel Tilden, and the Stolen Election of 1876, “a popular legend has developed of a shadowy cabal of white politicians cynically selling out the futures of four million black southerners in return for Rutherford B. Hayes’s ascension to the White House.”
Regardless of the impact of the Wormley Bargain, Republicans did keep their end of the bargain and withdrew the remaining troops from the South and appointed Carl Schurz, a Southerner, as Secretary of the Interior. Democrats, however, broke their part of the bargain by refusing to support Garfield for Speaker of the House, and by promptly setting up Jim Crow laws designed to keep blacks in a position of political and social inferiority.
Rutherford B. Hayes was finally declared the winner of the 1876 Presidential Election two days before he was to be sworn in. He may have been President, but his ability to govern had been compromised, as lingering bad feelings over his election caused his opponents to call him “His Fraudulency,” “Rutherfraud,” and “Returning Board Hayes,” foreclosing any possibility of a second term. He was succeeded by Garfield in 1881.
Meanwhile an embittered and physically deteriorating Samuel Tilden, the man who won the popular vote but lost out on the Presidency, declined the opportunity to run again in 1880 and died in 1886.
