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ANOTHER VIEW OF “THE HAYES-TILDEN CONTEST”

A REPLY TO COLONEL WATTERSON IN THE MAY “CENTURY”

BY EX-SENATOR GEORGE F. EDMUNDS

The sole surviving member of the Electoral Commission

THE rather astonishing article of Mr. Henry Watterson in the May number of THE CENTURY opens to me the opportunity and the duty of giving my recollections of such of the inside history, as well as of the outside, as came to my knowledge at the time, in connection with the Hayes-Tilden contest for the Presidency. I believe that the time has come when, among fair-minded and intelligent Americans who will investigate the public and printed documents and papers in existence on the subject, there will be few divergent opinions touching the justice and lawfulness of the election of Mr. Hayes. They will find that he was lawfully elected and instituted to the office by fair and lawful means. I wish that such investigators could have the benefit of the correspondence and other papers to which Mr. Watterson refers, as well as of all other documents and papers touching the subject. All the papers relating to the action of the Senate committee on the Electoral Bill, and of our conferences with the House committee, are in my possession and are open to the examination of the student, the politician, and the historian.

In the year 1876 many of the States which had been engaged in the war for secession were still in a condition of unrest, and their Negro citizens, as well as many whites who had supported the United States and were lawfully in those of the Southern States under consideration (and opprobriously called “carpet-baggers”), were under great apprehension of personal danger. The Negro citizens in many instances had suffered, and they were continually in danger of violence from the efforts of a secret association known as “the Ku-Klux Klan” to prevent their voting as they were entitled to do under the provisions of the Fifteenth Amendment. In this state of things small detachments of the army of the United States were stationed in various places where the greatest danger of intimidation and violence appeared to exist. The civil operations of the Government required the presence of these troops in such places, not only to assist the state authorities in preserving the peace at a national election when there should be one, but also to protect the operations of the United States in carrying on its share of the civil government, such as customs, internal revenues, post-offices, etc. I suppose everybody will agree that the army of the United States must be somewhere, and has a right to be somewhere within the country; and nobody has yet maintained that any State has a right to exclude their presence. I think not a soldier interfered with any right or peaceable conduct, or was present at any polling-place in the late “Confederate States” in the election of 1876. When the elections came on nothing but violence could prevent either whites or Negroes who were lawfully entitled to vote from doing so in peace, as in most instances they did. In the States where Negro citizens were in great majority the Hayes ticket, naturally, should have prevailed. In some of them it did prevail, and the necessary certificates of the result were sent to the president of the Senate, as required by the Constitution. The “grandfather” legislation had not yet been invented.