COLONEL WATTERSON’S REJOINDER TO EX-SENATOR EDMUNDS
COMMENTS ON “ANOTHER VIEW OF ‘THE HAYES-TILDEN CONTEST’” ([SEE PAGE 193])
To the Editor of THE CENTURY:
Sir: If I may say so without departing from the respect and regard in which I hold Senator Edmunds, he has made rather a case at law than a contribution to history. With the trained skill of an expert, he emphasizes all that may be pleaded on his own side, whilst either ignoring or belittling the strength of the other side. The ultimate verdict in the matter of Tilden versus Hayes will turn on issues which the Electoral Commission refused, by a party vote of eight to seven, to consider; on evidence in equity which was not allowed to become a part of the record; upon rulings of the majority which the minority claimed, and justly claimed I think, to have been sometimes erroneous and sometimes inconsistent, but in every instance obedient to the party exigency.
I have neither the mind nor the heart to recall the wrangles and passions of the controversy. To me they mean nothing more than the half-forgotten dreams of a very dark night of the long ago. One may dismiss the exciting incidents: the conflicting testimony in Florida and Louisiana; the contested elector in Oregon; the tergiversation in opinions of some of the members of the court; the playing State law against National law, and vice versa, in a shuttlecock process all on one side, the unescapable inference being that from the first the majority was bent upon denying Tilden the one vote needed to make him President and securing to Hayes the twelve votes needed to make him President.
One may likewise dismiss the long list of questionable persons appointed to office under the Hayes administration, apparently from no other consideration than their service as members of returning boards and officers of election, most of them charged with corrupt practices.
At the election of the seventh of November, 1876, the popular vote was as follows:
| For Tilden | 4,300,316 |
| For Hayes | 4,036,016 |
| Tilden’s majority | ,264,300 |
The total vote for Tilden was nearly 700,000 larger than Grant’s against Greeley. Of the electoral vote, the Republicans conceded Tilden 184. The electoral votes of Louisiana and Florida, thrown into dispute before Congress and the Electoral Commission, but finally cast by the commission for Hayes, determined the result. Referring to my narrative of the events immediately succeeding the election and preceding the creation of the electoral tribunal, judge Edmunds says:
Historically, it is very unfortunate that Mr. Watterson did not include in his enlivening article copies of his telegraphic and other correspondence with Mr. Tilden from New Orleans, and elsewhere, for it would certainly and truly, as far as it went, throw much light on the existing drama being displayed, as well as the plans and work behind the curtain whereby (we may believe) it was hoped to produce the election of Mr. Tilden. We Republicans at Washington were forced to believe that an effort was being made, by every means that could be employed, to overcome the Hayes majority of one. During that whole period, so far as I personally knew or was informed, there never was any scheme or act of the Republicans to bribe any State canvassing board or elector by money or promise in support of Mr. Hayes’s election. We did (if I may borrow an ancient classic simile) fear “the Greeks bearing gifts.” We were morally certain that a large majority of the legal voters in the States of South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana were earnestly in favor of the election of Mr. Hayes, and we believe that if violence or some other kind of unlawful influence were not brought to bear the electoral votes of those States would be cast for him; but when the secret though bold operations of Colonel Pelton became partly known we were astonished and alarmed, though not disheartened, and we went forward in our efforts to provide by law for the final act in the great drama.
It is quite certain that all the telegraphic correspondence I had with Mr. Tilden reached Republican headquarters as soon as it reached Gramercy Park. Assuredly I never wrote or wired him a word that I should be unwilling to have appear in print. May I not claim the circumstance that the Republicans used none of it as going to the credit either of my prudence or my patriotism, or of both?
At no time did I apprehend any physical collision, although General Grant seemed to fear one, and although two of the most famous and popular heroes among the general officers of the Union army at Washington were pressing armed organization upon the Democrats. It was distinctly the South that would not listen to the suggestion of force. Truth to say, both sides were playing something of a “bluff.” Neither was either ready or anxious for a fight, and, in extremis, whichever won, the other was bound to submit. My sole thought was publicity, agitation; this I urged from the outset and continued to urge to the end.
In reverting to these events, my purpose was chiefly to vindicate the personal integrity of Mr. Tilden. Neither he nor Mr. Hewitt nor any one in authority was willing to win by fraud. As I have stated, and as Mr. Hewitt stated, fraudulent possession was offered, and I directly know that Mr. Tilden refused to accept the Presidency as the result of an arrangement perfectly simple and obvious and absolutely certain.
One might imagine, by a perusal of Judge Edmunds, that the Republican lambs were greatly afraid of the Democratic wolves, and put themselves to many pains to circumvent the Democratic conspiracy set on foot immediately after the election. As a matter of fact, the reverse is true. The returning boards were made up of Republicans, not Democrats. The Southern States were still under military surveillance and martial law. All were invoked to coerce the vote and the counting of the vote. Whatever the worst of Democrats may have contemplated, the Republicans overmatched by deeds. They held the resources and the power of possession; the State governors, the President of the United States, the Senate, the Supreme Court, the army and navy; the Democrats held only the lower House of Congress, and what they believed the justice of their case.
Hayes had to receive every vote in dispute to be elected. The loss of a single vote would have defeated him. Hence the majority of the Electoral Commission could not throw out Florida and Louisiana, as many thought the equities in each instance required. In his speech on the vote of Louisiana, the very eminent Julius H. Seelye, president of Amherst College, who sat in the Forty-fourth Congress as a Republican from Massachusetts, said:
Wiser and more candid men would be hard to find than those of this Electoral Commission who have pronounced the decision on which we are now called to vote. I acknowledge I think I appreciate the strength of their position. We cannot be too jealous of the constitutional right of a State to choose its Presidential electors “in such manner as the Legislature thereof may direct.” We cannot be too careful of congressional interference with the duly accredited results of such a choice. Whether we like or dislike it, the right of a State to choose its electors in its own way, and to ascertain and certify as to the method of their choice, is beyond our lawful control. All this I accept as a formal and technical statement of a clear principle of our Constitution; a principle, moreover, in its general application as wise as it is clear.
But, Mr. Speaker, there are cases where the summum jus becomes the summa injuria; cases where the law, strictly interpreted and strenuously enforced, works out results contrary to all law; and in such cases equity lays the letter of the law aside and lifts her voice in judgment as the sovereign spirit of the law, the spirit of righteousness and truth declares. I find such a case in the pending issue.
Granted—and I hold this to be incontestable—that this Electoral Commission has clearly interpreted and accurately applied the Constitution and the laws to the question submitted to them, yet what if the very principle on which the Constitution and the laws must ultimately rest becomes thereby subverted? Granted that the decision reached is fairly within the bond; yet what if the pound of flesh cannot be taken without its drop of blood? What if this jealous care for State rights and constitutional prerogatives may so foster faction, and so blunt the sense of justice, and so increase the prevalence of fraud that the very foundation of prerogatives and rights has disappeared?
... No nation, said Niebuhr, ever died except by suicide; and the suicidal poison is engendered not so much in the unjust statutes of a government as in the immoral practices of a people, which the government is unable to punish and unable to restrain. It is because I fear that the strict and accurate interpretation of the Constitution, applied to the electoral vote of Louisiana, would imperil that vote in the future, and increase the very danger which the Constitution intended to avoid, that I am unable to concur with such an application.
I commend this to the perusal of Senator Edmunds, though it is unlikely to impress a mind which could declare, as Senator Edmunds does declare in the April issue of THE CENTURY MAGAZINE, “that the constitutional amendments and reconstruction and other laws were passed by Congress as the best measures available in the complicated and untoward situation. These measures were not measures of cruelty or tyranny, but of justice and hopefulness. After the lapse of years it is evident to me that nothing better could have been done, and that nothing done by Congress should have been omitted.”
Against the plan of reconstruction, here approved so unreservedly and despite the events that came after, unremembered if not condoned by Judge Edmunds, I set the plan of Abraham Lincoln, laid in a larger conception of human nature and better knowledge of the character of the people of the South. None of the dangers apprehended and foreshadowed by Mr. Edmunds would have come to pass had Lincoln lived to put his plan on foot and conduct it to achievement. The South was in desolation. The leaders of the secession movement had been wholly discredited by the result of the war. All their calculations and promises had been disastrously falsified. They could no more escape the consequences of their failure than could other public men, baffled and defeated by events.
The murder of Lincoln removed the sun from the heavens. The clouds of hate and fear, or both, overspread the sky. The policy of “thorough,” adopted by the Radicals in Congress, was not only cruel, taking no account of the myriads in the South who had perpetrated no wrong, but was obtusely senseless, on one hand breeding an oligarchy of corruption, and, on the other, driving a whole people to desperation. It was thus, and thus alone, that a “solid South” was created.
God was more merciful than Congress. The North came to see that the South was a part of itself. Nothing happened in the South that, in the same circumstances and conditions, would not have happened at the North. We are indeed the most homogeneous people on the face of the globe. Our balanced system of representative government, strong in the hearts of the people, is the best and freest, because the most flexible and adjustable, on earth. We have outlived secession; we have survived reconstruction; we have weathered a disputed succession, complicated and embittered; we are passing through, and shall surely surmount, other and still more insidious approaches of revolution. Tilden is dead. Hayes is dead. They were but atoms in a sum total which sweeps onward unaffected by either of them, then, or since—a few loaves and a few fishes the while involved—toward the goal, the yet more perfect day, that shines before us.
HENRY WATTERSON,
“Courier-Journal” Office,
Louisville, Kentucky.