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Fraud of the Century: Rutherford B. Hayes, Samuel Tilden, and the Stolen Election of 1876

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Americans all over the country went to bed after election night thinking that the Democrats had won the White House. The Democratic candidate won the popular vote, and while this was conceded by all, the antiquated Electoral College system made the popular vote of decidedly secondary importance. There were races in such states as Florida where the balloting was contested, and outright fraud at many levels was claimed. Election officials headed south to try to provide trustworthy re-counts, but more important were the deals made secretly between the press, the state officials, and the eager Republicans who intended to put their man in office. Only after a Republican member of the Supreme Court cast his vote was there a certified Republican victory, but the outcome will ever be suspect of polling chicanery. So it was that Americans elected a president in 1876. The parallels to the 2000 election are often surprising, but those coincidences are not the point of _Fraud of the Century: Rutherford B. Hayes, Samuel Tilden, and the Stolen Election of 1876_ (Simon & Schuster) by Roy Morris, Jr. The election was indeed stolen, but Hayes's eventual victory and its cost to public confidence in governmental capability meant that Reconstruction was ended and Jim Crow came into power.

Both Hayes and Tilden went to bed on election night assured that Tilden had won. Final returns showed that Tilden had won the popular vote by 250,000, and had 184 of the 185 electoral votes sewn up; there were four states which were late in reporting, and one electoral vote from any of them would have given Tilden the election. It seemed a done deal, but Republicans refused to give up. Alternative counts were produced, and Congress set up an Electoral Commission of fifteen members. Southern Democrats started making deals with Hayes's men, and were promised that federal troops would be withdrawn from the states still under reconstruction governments. Blacks who had helped bring the Republicans into office were cut out of the deal, which ensured that black Americans in the South would be held back from participating in politics until the modern civil rights movement. Four months after the election, and just before swearing in, Hayes was declared the winner. It was the most corrupt election in our nation's history, and yet Morris shows that the two candidates were decent men forced by circumstances to play roles in it. Tilden, especially, shines; he clearly saw what would be good for the nation, and acted unselfishly, even though he had been defrauded by the Republicans. Morris says, "It was an act of supreme patriotism on the part of a man who had won, if not the presidency, at least the election."

_Fraud of the Century_ is a rousing story, full of dirty tricks and rascals. Certainly it has relevance to recent events, but the 1876 election has been mostly forgotten. Morris has dramatically brought it forward as an example of how the Electoral College previously complicated and reversed popular will, with serious repercussions for subsequent history. Lively and well researched, without polemics regarding current events, the book rightly puts our last election in historical context.

Roy Morris's history of the 1876 election is a rousing work that brings to life the incredible politcs of America's Victorian Gilded Age. Despite how history has treated the politicians of this era, Morris explains well that both combatants, Ohio Gov. Rutherford B Hayes and New York Gov. Samuel Tilden, would have been worthy of the White House in any era. Morris's respect for Gilded Age politicians was the high point of the book for me. He shows us more than the non-entities history has treated them. Hayes, a real Civil War hero (as opposed to other CW Generals, like "General" Ben Harrison) who was a cagier politician than often given credit for. Tilden, a sickly and brilliant bachelor, a disciple of Martin Van Buren and maybe America's last Jacksonian, is shown as a methodical and brilliant reformer who blew up the Tweed Ring.

Morris also excells at looking at the real issues of the campiagn: government reform, fighting Grantism, and most of all----Reconstruction. The story of the this miserable election bears little resembles to the 2000 election. In 2000, the basic story was a bunch of old people did not vote right. Nobody did anything. In this election, you not only had contested states, but SOUTHERN states who 16 years before had left the union. Since then, carpetbag regimes had taken overm causing near strife across the south. One must remeber that Civil War seemed more imminent in 1876 than 1860. At the heart of this fight was the growing feeling in the North that continued occupation and negro rights was just not worth it anymore.

My one qualm with the book is Morris seems to be blinded by the consequences of blacks by this election. He seems to overlap his sympathy for Tilden to include the former confederate, white Democrats in the South. He minimizes the violence in an attempt to build a case against Hayes and the Republicans. I felt that Morris could have been more critical of the Bourbon southern democrats in this work. All in all, however, it is a wonderfull read. We find that America was robbed of two great men in this election. Tilden never entered the White House, and the talented Hayes was never able to execute his full potential due to the circumstances of his election. A fascinating book.

This is a wonderful account of a forgotten crises, the election of 1876. This was the election that created the `Southern Block' of unrepentant deep south governors and ended reconstruction, thus handing power back to the same people who had stood strong in the face of Lincoln in 1859. An amazing story of American politics as it was in the late 1800s. The machinations, the political machines, the `smoke filled rooms' and the `gray beards' who were king makers.

This is a riveting, if sometimes disorganized, story of the `stolen election' in which competing delegations from southern states created a crises that in some ways shows the weakness and towering strength of American democracy. The subsequent election of 1880, covered expertly in `Dark Horse' which serves as a good companion to this book, was also tumultuous. A wonderful read the opens up the whole theatre that was Americana in the 1870s. The personalities of Grant and others are exposed in this book as well.

Roy Morris is obviously an extremely partisan Democrat. He clearly believes that Gore had the 2000 election stolen from him by the Supreme Court, and that a similar miscarriage of justice happened to Samuel Tilden in 1876. He thus makes a lot of analogies between the two elections, and apologizes for Tilden's flaws so as to make him out to be the superior Presidential candidate. (For example, he forgives Tilden for his working with Tammany Hall, because he later came to oppose the machine.)

The analogies are quite flawed, of course, because the issues were quite different. In particular, African-Americans in 1876 were by and large Republicans, while white supremacists were strong Democrats (even if Tilden was not himself a white supremacist), while those positions were reversed in 2000. Therefore, the issue of intimidation of African-Americans cut the opposite way. And one feature of the 1876 election was unique: the Illinois (Democratic-controlled) state legislature essentially elected Republican Hayes, because they chose David Davis, the "independent" Supreme Court Justice on the 15-member Electoral Commission that oversaw the vote review, to a Senate seat, forcing a new member to be chosen to the commission, and that one, Justice Bradley, while the most nearly independent justice they could find, was still a Republican who joined the others in an 8-7 party-line vote on all the disputed electors.

Trying to get the facts from this book, I conclude that Tilden probably did deserve to get the electoral vote of Louisiana (and thus the presidency), with Hayes deserving the other disputed votes. But the obvious partisanship of the book makes me doubt this conclusion, because I suspect relevant facts have been omitted.

I would wish for a more impartial treatment of this, the most controversial election ever up to 2000. Too bad.

A classic case of a grand theft. But who really stole what. One party cheats the electorate in the states of Oregon, Florida, South Carolina, and Louisiana. The other party disenfranchises millions of former slaves in these states and the other 10 Southern states. Morris does a great job detailing the crimes of the board of election in the three states. He spends less time in detailing how a newly liberated people had their votes taken away. All that said, this is a great read on how the election was pushed away from the statistical winner (Sam Tilden). Both Hayes and Tilden were ethical men, it was their party people who were the decievers.

I like this book and believe that it is a great story. However it only tells part of the story.

I really wanted to like this book. I was eager to start it, as the topic sounded utterly fascinating. And the topic was. But I really struggled to finish this book. There is a significant amount of background information and all of the relevant information on the 1876 election itself. It wasn't until I got to the final chapter, which explains how Congress decided the election, that it was any kind of page-turner.

The writing style isn't necessarily bad; I can't quite put my finger on it, but there is a lot of minutiae. My other qualm is the author's blatant bias; the introduction practically depicts Hayes as the evil George W. Bush of the nineteenth century. And while some of the anti-Hayes bias can be found throughout the book, the author does at least concede in the end that the corruption of the 1876 election was the work of the two parties, not of either candidate.

Overall, an amazing story and one worth reading and being familiar with. But I'm not convinced this is the best telling of that story.

It is unfortunate that the election of 1876 continues to be described in terms the Ku Klux Klan would smile upon. Consider the casual use of honored Klan terms such as 'carpetbagger' (any northern federalist) and 'scalawag' (any southern federalist). For Democrat Tilden, Morris quotes but immediately rebuts newspaper slander. For black election commissioners, the newspaper slander is gospel. When white 'rifle clubs'murder former members of federal colored units in Edgefield, it is explained away with conflicting testimony. When (federalist) South Carolina election officials throw out the Edgefield votes, Morris tells us the black vote was probably split. When former slaves lose the right to vote, we are told their 'rights' were just an 'experiment.'

Just what was the 'Fraud of the Century'? Morris concludes the book by claiming he finds Hayes 'personally blameless'. I wondered just what Morris thought the fraud to be until discovering the book is an elaboration of a 1988 article and the title is a quoted headline used to conclude the article. Morris makes no argument for a specific 'fraud', instead he is simply sharing one contemporary opinion.

I came to the book to read about Hayes and his fraud. The fraud I was interested in reading about was not covered, though. I thought the fraud of 1876 was Hayes' 'bargain' with Wade Hampton and other Southern slave-ocrats. In return for the presidency, Hayes agreed to forget the 15th amendment to the US constitution.

Morris convinced me the fraud lay elsewhere. If nothing else, Morris argues the election of 1876 was 'war by other means.' Both Republican and Democrats were led by former generals. Prior to 1876, the activity was called a 'canvass'. After 1876, it was called a 'campaign'. Tilden, a man without military connections and experience in command of troops, never had a chance.

Consider a less Klanish version of events in Charleston. On Feb 18th, 1865, Charleston fell to units of the 21st US Colored Troops, followed by two companies of the 54th Massachusetts Volunteers (colored). After Lincoln's death, slave-ocrat leaning President Johnson kept southerners of color who had served in the federal army from voting and allowed the election of slave-ocrat colonel, James Orr. Orr's term in office was cut short by Federal General Robert K. Scott, who establish voting rights for federal colored soldiers. In 1874, a former lieutenant of Colored calvary, with the support of former colored South Carolina troops was elected governor, Daniel Chamberlain. This brings us to 4 murders in Edgefield, rifle clubs, night riders and the election of slavo-crat hero Wade Hampton.

Which brings us back to locating the 'fraud of the century' and its meaning in the context of 'war by other means.' Until the readmission of rebel states, the civil rights of the slavo-crat soldiers were suspended, including their right to vote in elections. In fact, because the Rebels had taken up arms against their own nation - an act of treason according to the Constitution ("Treason against the United States shall consist only in levying war against them . . ." Art. III, Sec. 3, cl. 1), they could have been executed (Art. III, Sec. 3, cl. 2). Instead, amnesty was granted to the Rebels if they took an oath of fidelity to the United States, including the 15th Amendment which guaranteed the voting rights of former federal colored soldiers. Maybe, the artful way these oaths were circumvented represented the 'fraud of the century.' Morris was right. Hayes could do little to change the reality of politics south of the Mason-Dixon line.

The US is now engaged the preliminaries to another election in-lieu of war. The issues regarding post-war elections should not be lost on us. After all, what is the meaning of 'fraud' when war-by-other-means is the focus?

After reading this, you will want to take a shower, because this is one slimy, grubby tale of politics of the lowest order. If you are someone who needs to know who the good guys and bad guys are, then you should avoid this book. Virtually everyone emerges from this story tarnished.

On first glance, this is the story of a stolen election. Samuel Tilden won the popular vote by 260,000 votes and initially appeared to have a comfortable margin of victory in the electoral college. By the time the dust settled, the votes in 3 states had been creatively interpreted and the Twelth Amendment of the Constitution circumvented to give Rutherford B. Hayes the presidency. It would seem to be simple enough: the Democrats are the victimized good guys and the corrupt Republicans were the nasty bad guys.

Of course, nothing is as simple as it seems. As Morris delves more deeply into the subterreanean political strata, he shows that the story is actually multiple stories of various power blocs pursuing their respective goals in some rather unsavory ways. Were the carpetbag Republican governments in the South maintaining their power through fraud & corruption? Certainly they were --- however, the Southern Democrats were also expanding their power base through violence and intimidation of black voters. Of course, Republicans were also not above using the same intimidation tactics, sometimes against apostate black voters who had the temerity to support the Democrats. One is left with a bad taste in one's mouth in regards to all parties involved.

Morris also draws the distinction between party politics at the national and local levels, and illustrates that different levels of the same party very often have mutually exclusive goals. A case in point would be the Democratic Party in South Carolina & Louisiana, which was more concerned with ending Federal occupation in both states than with getting Tilden elected. The local Democrats of both states were willing to deal with either Hayes or Tilden to achieve that goal. Morris explicitly denies that Hayes cut a specific deal with Southern Democrats, but through vague platform statements and soothing statements through his lieutenants, Hayes was able to reassure Democrats in Louisiana & South Carolina that they need not worry about a Federal presence in their respective states for too much longer. Democratic leaders in the South also knew that protesting too violently against the election results might result in renewed Federal occupation throughout the South --- something, considering that the Civil War had ended only 11 years before, that they were none too eager to provoke. The Democrats took the most pragmatic approach, even though it probably cost Tilden the election.

The Republicans, on the other hand, demonstrated that as a party they were willing to abandon Southern Republicans, particularly those who were black, to their fates in order to maintain possession of the White House. The 1876 elections signalled the end of Reconstruction, although the Grant administration had been slowly disengaging for the last two years approximately. The Republicans of the South were abandoned for the greater good of the party, or so the Republican power brokers convinced themselves.

As for the candidates themselves, they do not emerge too covered in slime, but they are hardly unblemished. While Hayes was not complicit in his lieutenants' scheming, Morris observes, "Whether he should have known about them in the first place is another question altogether." Tilden is similary compromised, as his lieutenants (albeit without his knowledge) attempted to bribe various officials into producing a favorable result for their candidate.

Thankfully, Morris does not overindulge in the "what if" brand of speculative history. Would Tilden have made a good President? Perhaps, but his political instincts failed him during the election crisis. If he had been more actively involved and had courted the necessary people (as Hayes did), Tilden might have been able to produce a favorable result. As it was, he withdrew from view and remained passive throughout the crisis, allowing the momentum to slip away. Would Tilden have been as passive as president. I am inclined to think that he would have been as unremarkable as Hayes. Hayes, for his part, entered the White House under a cloud which never totally left him during his one term. What he left posterity is thoroughly uninspiring.

As a whole, this book is recommended reading for anyone who thinks that US history is less squalid than some Banana Republic. It is important to keep in mind that 4 presidential elections (1800, 1824, 1876 & 2000) were decided in rather controversial fashion. At least one other election (1888) was decided by fraud, and one can also look at other elections (1960, for example) with a healthy dose of skepticism. Yes folks, it can happen here, and it has several times. If nothing else, the election of 1876 should serve as a warning against complacency.

If you're looking for a fresh account of the 1876 presidential election that will provide the relevant background, relate the principal facts, and describe the roles of the various players in the drama, Roy Morris' book will do fine. (His vivid retelling of the actual "counting" of the Electoral College votes would by itself recommend the book to such a reader.) If instead you are seeking an in-depth, defensible interpretation of the events, one that will make use of the latest scholarship, then I feel "Fraud of the Century" falls short.

Author Roy Morris, Jr. relies heavily on cliches in his recounting of the campaign, election, and aftermath. Pejorative terms and expressions such as scalawag, carpetbagger, and "waving the bloody shirt" abound, used by Morris without reservation or even definition. The "bloody shirt" characterization is applied whenever he tells of a speech defending black voting rights in the South. Overall, the impression builds that Morris' sympathies are distinctly on the side of those who sought to restore the pre-war power balance in the Confederate states. While forthrightly condemning the means -- thus the "stolen election" of the subtitle -- he nevertheless sees the result as a necessary and inevitable restoration of "home rule". His treatment of the various Reconstruction state governments -- particularly that in Mississippi under the estimable Adelbert Ames -- fails to properly recognize the validity of what those regimes were trying to accomplish. Instances of fraud, incompetence, and the use of force in those Reconstruction governments are presented as if they were defining and unique characteristics, rather than attributes at least equally found in the preceding and succeeding white regimes. And by and large he accepts the self-serving accounts in Hayes' diary as truth, while always casting aspersions on the motives of the Radical Republicans.

Was there was an explicit quid-pro-quo that motivated Southern Democrats to acquiesce in the reversal of the actual results and to give the presidency to the Republican Hayes? This question has been a significant one in the historiography of the period and has been framed in part as "Was there a Compromise of 1877?" Morris seems to conclusively build the case that there was such an arrangement and then surprisingly to write that the resolution of the electoral crisis "did not depend on any secret deals."

This could possibly be read as a nuanced view that pivots on what actually constitutes a "secret deal." Or that there was such a deal, but that delivery of the presidency was only the occasion for it and not actually an element in the deal. But to this reader, Morris' interpretation seems to be simply that, since the "understandings" were never embodied in a written contract, and since Hayes managed to retain deniability of any such deal, one therefore did not exist. This seems to me to be a naive view, and the events Morris relates argue against it.

Overall, the author accepts the interpretation of Reconstruction -- and thus the merits of its demise -- that dominated both scholarly works and textbooks in various forms for over a hundred years. Generally, that view claimed that the end of Radical Republican governments in the South "marked the end of force as an element in American political life and a return to the ways of conciliation" (Randall and Donald). That view has recently been effectively challenged by works such as the well-documented "Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory" by David Blight. Although Morris cites that work in his bibliography, he seems to have ignored its uncovering of how our collective perception of Reconstruction had been warped by the need to reintegrate the (white) South back into the Union.

Putting aside this somewhat stale interpretation and the effect it seemingly has on the way Morris characterizes many events, his book otherwise serves as a compelling look at the circumstances that produced a turning point in American history.

Jay Winick (auther of "April 1865") reviews this on the back cover as a "rip roaring" book, but I do not see it. That said, there is a plethera of fascinating information about the two candidates of the 1876 Centennial election, a detail-by-detail account of the state election board battles, and a good summary of Hayes and Tilden after the fact. However, though it certainly is not boring, Morris does not write the story with quite the grip it promises.

Morris writes with a clear anti-Republican slant, which is evidenced by the book and chapter titles (he chose quotes as titles and could have chosen other quotes easily) as well as the inordinate amount of time spent exposing election fraud versus the time spent exposing voter intimidation and the like. That said, the subtitle of the book mentions the former and not the latter, so this is not all too terrible. It should also be noted that the bias is not anti-Hayes as much as it is anti-Republican, and moreover, the tale is not incorrect, per se; rather, it just leaves out a lot of the other side. This is a story that all political fans should know, regardless of how not quite perfect this book may be written, and I would recommend Morris's work for sure but without getting overly excited. There are a few books around, one by William Rehnquist even, about the 1876 election; perhaps I will go find another and read to get a better picture.