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1876 Democratic Party Platform Donald Bruce Johnson, comp., National Party Platforms (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1978), 1:49–51. To many in and out of the Democratic Party, 1876 looked to be a winning year. The Republicans had been in office for a long period of time, Reconstruction had run its life course, northern public opinion had moved past and grown tired of “the southern question ” that had hung over the nation for decades, and the political corruptions that surrounded the second Ulysses S. Grant administration looked to set the stage for a return of the Democrats to political power—especially the plum of the United States political world, the presidency. This 1876 platform denounced the Republicans for their alleged misgovernance and ill-fated public policies, while stressing the Democratic Party’s commitment to the United States tradition of a small federal government, leaving most issues to be settled by the localities within the states or by the states themselves . While the call for a federal service continued to receive lip service in this platform, other issues caught the party’s attention, such as the money question (Greenback resumption), discriminations against Roman Catholic schools, and calls for anti-Chinese labor legislation (“Mongolian” in this document, to emphasize just how different the Chinese were from the old-stock Europeans) to protect American workers on the West Coast from this group of immigrants. Like most political organizations, this party platform sought to place itself in the reform tradition of the United States even if, for the most part, the reforms sought meant a return to the states and localities overseeing African American rights and property , greater state action as opposed to federal action in the balance of federalism, and small government overall. For their nominees, the Democratic Party chose the reforming governor of New York, Samuel J. Tilden, for the presidency and ex-senator and governor of Indiana, Thomas Andrews Hendricks, for the vice presidency. In the general election, Tilden Documentary History of the American Civil War Era 178 won a majority of the popular vote (51 percent) but came up short in the Electoral College. But Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina sent two sets of Electoral College votes (one set from the “redeemed” white Democratic Party–dominated state government and one set from the “Reconstructed” biracial Republican Party– dominated state government) to the Congress for counting. Without any guidance from the 1787 Constitution on how to decide which of these two sets of counts constituted valid results from the states, Congress established an extraconstitution committee, the 1876–1877 Electoral Commission, to take testimony and decide which sets of ballots (and one disputed elector issue from Oregon ) Congress ought to accept. It was not until early March 1877 that the commission completed its work and awarded all of the disputed electoral votes to the Republican Party candidate, thus denying Tilden and the Democratic Party the Executive Mansion. We, the delegates of the Democratic party of the United States, in National Convention assembled, do hereby declare the administration of the Federal Government to be in great need of immediate reform; do hereby enjoin upon the nominees of this Convention, and of the Democratic party in each State, a zealous effort and co-operation to this end, and do here appeal to our fellow-citizens of every former political connection to undertake with us this first and most pressing patriotic duty for the Democracy of the whole country. We do here reaffirm our faith in the permanence of the Federal Union, our devotion to the Constitution of the United States, with its amendments universally accepted as a final settlement of the controversies that engendered civil war, and do here record our steadfast confidence in the perpetuity of republican self-government; in absolute acquiescence in the will of the majority, the vital principle of republics; in the supremacy of the civil over the military; in the two-fold separation of church and state, for the sake alike of civil and religious freedom; in the equality of all citizens before just laws of their own enactment; in the liberty of individual conduct unvexed by sumptuary laws; in the faithful education of the rising generation, that they may preserve, enjoy and transmit these best conditions of human happiness and hope. We behold the noblest products of a hundred years of changeful history. But while upholding the bond of our Union and great charter of these our rights, it behooves a free people to practice also that...

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