1876 Winning the Election by Refusing to Certify the Vote & Throwing Out Results

The initial vote counts for three states were incredibly close in the days after the  November 7 Election of 1876. In South Carolina, Republican Rutherford B. Hayes appeared to have won by about a thousand votes. In Florida, Democrat Tilden was ahead by fewer than a hundred votes. In Louisiana, Tilden led by more than 6,000 votes. Respected men from both parties were sent to the states to observe the state election boards verify the vote totals. These state “return boards” were themselves highly political.

Union generals Francis Barlow and Lew Wallace were dispatched as part of the Republican observation team.  Lew Wallace would publicly praise the Florida vote counting system while writing to his wife that:

“It is terrible to see the extent to which all classes go in their determination to win. Conscience offers no restraint. Nothing is so common as the resort to perjury, unless it is violence—in short, I do not know whom to believe. If we win, our methods are subject to impeachment for possible fraud. If the enemy win, it is the same thing exactly—doubt, suspicion, irritation go with the consequence, whatever it may be.”[1]

The count in Alachua County in Florida was so troubling that one of the Republican observers, former Union General Francis Barlow, said that he could not back the Republican position on the vote tally. No one thought that the county, with a large Black electorate, would go for anyone but the Republicans, but the size of the Republican victory was in dispute. The Democrats obtained affidavits from Green Moore and Floyd Duke, two poll inspectors, who said that the actual vote in the county was 180 for Hayes  to 136 for Tilden, even though they had falsely certified that the Republicans had received 390 votes. The Republicans countered with affidavits from the same two men in which Duke, an African American, claimed he had been intimidated by the Democrats into signing the affidavit alleging fraud. The two poll inspectors now claimed that their original certification was correct! Similar challenges and allegations of fraud were lodged in regard to other counties. Charges included the exclusion of the votes of whole precincts by the Republicans and the importation of Georgian Democrats into the state by train to vote. Explosive, and sometimes contradictory, affidavits flew like rifle fire in this last battle of the Civil War. [2]

By November 30, 1876, with votes being challenged and some thrown out, the questionable tally from Florida had flipped the state from a tiny plurality for Tilden to an even smaller one for Hayes. The Republican was now ahead by 40 votes! [2]

In Louisiana, the Republican partisans led by Senator John Sherman, brother of the general, hunted down anyone who claimed to have been disenfranchised from whom they obtained an affidavit. This was not a difficult task. Louisiana had been the cradle of the Knights of the White Camellia terrorist group, the White League armed militia had seized New Orleans in 1874, and  the state was an important recruiting ground for the Ku Klux Klan. Riots in New Orleans and massacres of Blacks in rural parishes were almost annual occurrences in the state. [3]

While the Democrats had made some effort to win over Black voters in some parts of the state, in mostly Black Ouachita, East and West Feliciana, East Baton Rouge, and Morehouse the old methods of violence were employed to intimidate African Americans. White “rifle clubs” rode through Black communities singing songs that contained lyrics like this: “If a Nigg@r don’t vote with us he shall forever die.” In some instances, Blacks were whipped by night riders and at least one Black man and his child was alleged to have been murdered. The level of physical violence appears not to have been as great as in some previous years, but it may not have needed to be. By 1876 Blacks were aware of the fate of those of their race who challenged white dominance. [3]

In Louisiana in 1875 there were 104,192 Black voters and 84,167 white voters, the racial breakdown of the state’s electorate in itself made vote tallies favoring Tilden inherently suspicious, yet there they were. The only way for the Republicans to “win” the state was to change the vote count. If Blacks had been barred from voting in a Louisiana parish, should all of the votes of that parish be thrown out? At this point the only path to Republican victory was to not count some of the white votes cast.[4]

Note on Feature Illustration: Cover of Song Sheet “Honest Sam Tilden” Library of Congress.

Notes on Sources:

1. Fraud of the Century: Rutherford B. Hayes, Samuel Tilden, and the Stolen Election of 1876 by Roy Morris (p. 218). Simon & Schuster
2. Attacking the Returns New York Tribune Thursday, Nov 30, 1876 New York, NY Vol: XXXVI Issue: 11130 Page: 5; Fraud of the Century: Rutherford B. Hayes, Samuel Tilden, and the Stolen Election of 1876 (p. 218). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.
3. Paul Haworth The Hayes-Tilden Disputed Presidenital Election of 1876 pp. 90-91.
4. Paul Haworth The Hayes-Tilden disputed presidential election of 1876 p. 120 note; The Negro, the Republican Party, and the Election of 1876 in Louisiana by T. B. Tunnell, Jr. in Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association Vol. 7, No. 2 (Spring, 1966), pp. 101-116

Additional Sources:

Southern Democrats in the Crisis of 1876-1877: A Reconsideration of Reunion and Reaction by Michael Les Benedict in The Journal of Southern History Vol. 46, No. 4 (Nov., 1980), pp. 489-524 (36 pages)

Fraud of the Century: Rutherford B. Hayes, Samuel Tilden, and the Stolen Election of 1876 by Roy Morris published by Simon & Schuster (2007)

The Hayes-Tilden Disputed Presidential Election of 1876 by Paul Haworth (1906)

By One Vote: The Disputed Election of 1876 by Michael Holt published by University of Kansas Press (2008)

Reunion and Reaction: The Compromise of 1877 and the End of Reconstruction by C. Van Woodward published by Oxford University Press (1966)

Rutherford B. Hayes: Warrior and President by Ari Hoogenboom published by University of Kansas Press (1995)

The Reconstruction Presidents by Brooks D. Simpson University Press of Kansas; 2nd edition (1998)

Proceedings of the Electoral Commission published by the Government Printing Office (1877)

 

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