The New Nation

by Frederic L. Paxson

There was doubt throughout the canvass as to the nature of the issue, and when the votes were counted there was equal doubt as to which of the candidates had been elected. Tilden had received a popular plurality over Hayes of about 250,000 votes, but it was not certain that these carried with them a majority of the electoral college. Of the 369 electoral votes, Tilden and Hendricks had, without question, 184; while Hayes and Wheeler were equally secure in 166. The remaining 19 (Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina) were claimed by both parties, and it appeared that both claims were founded on widespread fraud. Unless all these 19 votes could be secured, Hayes was defeated, and to obtain them the Republican party set to work.

For weeks between the election and the counting of the electoral votes the United States debated angrily over the result. The Constitution required that when Congress should meet in joint session to hear the returns, the Vice-President should preside, and should open the certificates from the several States; and that the votes should then be counted. It was silent as to the body which should do the counting, or should determine which of two doubtful returns to count. Since the outcome of the election would turn upon the answer to this question, it was necessary to find some solution before March 4, 1877.

Failing to find in the Constitution a rule for determining cases such as this, Congress made its own, and created an Electoral Commission to which the doubtful cases were to be submitted. This body, fifteen in number, five each from Senate, House, and Supreme Court, failed, as historians have since failed, to convince the United States that the claims of either Republican or Democratic electors were sound. Honest men still differ in their beliefs. The members came out of the Commission as they went in, firm in the acceptance of their parties' claims, and since eight of the fifteen members were Republican, the result was a decision giving none of the nineteen contests to Tilden, and making possible the inauguration of Rutherford B. Hayes.

There was bitter partisanship shown over the contest, and the Democrats, with a real majority of popular votes, maintained that they had been robbed of the Presidency. Excepting this, there was no issue that clearly separated the followers of Hayes from those of Tilden when the former took the oath of office. There was likewise, unhappily for Hayes, no common bond by which the President could hold his own party together and make a successful administration.

Like three of his predecessors, John Adams, John Quincy Adams, and Martin Van Buren, Hayes was carried into office by the weight of a well-organized machine, rather than by his own hold upon the people. Like all of them he fought faction as a consequence, and every new step in administration forced upon him increased his embarrassment in conducting the Government. At the start, he alienated many Republicans by his policy toward the South.

Before the election Hayes had reached the conclusion that coercion in the South must be abandoned. The people must be left in control of their own institutions, and if they mishandled them must take the consequences. This meant that the last of the States, in which only the army garrisons had kept the Republicans in office, must revert to the control of the Democrats. It also meant an attack upon the President by those who still believed the South a menace, and those who cherished it as a political issue,—the "sentimentalists controlled by knaves," in Godkin's language. Hayes acted upon his conviction as soon as he took office, withdrew the troops, and turned over to the South her own problems. Political reconstruction, as shaped by Congress, had broken down in every part, and it remained to be seen whether the constitutional reconstruction, as embodied in the amendments, would be more permanently effective.

In addition to taking their issue from them, Hayes deprived the politicians of their plunder. The personal conduct of his household added nothing to his popularity in Washington, for his wife served no wines and gave to the White House the atmosphere of the standard middle-class American family. His official family struck a blow at the political use of offices.

Although many of the Liberal Republicans of 1872 were still dissatisfied and saw no prospect of a change of heart for their party, most of them had voted for Hayes, and one of them was taken into the new Cabinet. Carl Schurz became Secretary of the Interior, bringing into office for the first time an active desire to reform the civil service. Congress had made a timid experiment in civil service reform early in the seventies, but had soon wearied of it. Schurz announced that his subordinates would be chosen on merit, and acted upon the announcement.

The storm broke at once upon the Secretary over the issue of the patronage, and soon reached the President. The offices were not only valued assets of Senators and Representatives, who held control over their followers through them, but had come to be regarded as the cement that held the national party organization together. In the absence of an issue, the binding force of the offices had an enlarged importance. But Hayes generally backed up Schurz in the fight. The Indian Bureau, in particular, profited by the new policy. Two serious outbreaks had recently occurred as the result of bad administration. In one, Custer had been led to his destruction; in the other Chief Joseph and the Nez Percés had worried the regular army through a long campaign. The Democratic House of Representatives had in this very period been striking at the army appropriations in order to shape Grant's Southern policy. It had enabled Nast to draw, in one of his biting cartoons, a picture of the savage, the Ku-Klux, and the Congressman shaking hands over a common policy. Schurz and his Indian Commissioner foresaw the changes needed, now that the range Indians had all been consolidated on reserves, and took this time to reorganize the service.

Hayes refused to give over all the offices as spoils, and removed some officials for pernicious political activity. The most important removal was that of Chester A. Arthur, Collector of the Port of New York, whose enraged friends, Conkling among them, became the center of the attack on the titular head of the party. Sneering at the sincerity of the new policy, Conkling cynically declared that "when Doctor Johnson said that patriotism was the last refuge of a scoundrel, he ignored the enormous possibilities of the word reform." But because Hayes did not in every case follow an ideal that no other President had even set, he lost the support of the reformers who soon denounced him nearly as fiercely as did the "Stalwarts."