Hayes, Tilden, and American Politics

Michael F. Holt, the Langbourne M. Williams Professor of History at the University of Virginia, is widely recognized as a leading scholar of American politics in the period before the Civil War. He is the author of several books, but his preeminence derives largely from his magisterial work, The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party. Holt has now applied his analytical talents to the period after the war in By One Vote: The Disputed Presidential Election of 1876, a volume in the American Presidential Election series published by the University Press of Kansas.

The controversial contest between Rutherford B. Hayes and Samuel J. Tilden is hardly uncharted territory. Beginning with Paul Leland Haworth's The Hayes-Tilden Disputed Presidential Election of 1876 in 1906, many works in the last hundred years have examined this election and its consequences. Best known is Reunion and Reaction: The Compromise of 1877 and the End of Reconstruction (1951) by C. Vann Woodward, who posited an economic dimension to the alleged bargaining that put Hayes in the White House. Since Woodward's book appeared, the whole notion of a compromise ending the electoral dispute has come under challenge in articles by Michael Les Benedict and Allan Peskin and in Keith Ian Polakoff, The Politics of Inertia: The Election of 1876 and the End of Reconstruction (1973) and Charles W. Calhoun, Conceiving a New Republic: The Republican Party and the Southern Question, 1869–1900 (2006). Two recent popular books by Roy Morris and William Rehnquist present skewed treatments of little value to scholars. Like others, Holt is skeptical about the Woodward thesis, but his primary purpose is not merely to explain the resolution of the controversy but to place the election of 1876 in the wider context of the evolution of American politics in the late nineteenth century. The result is a richly textured account interwoven with manifold insights to which a review can scarcely do justice.

In setting the stage for the epic struggle over the electoral count, Holt assigns great significance to the admission of Colorado into the Union in the summer of 1876. If the new state had not taken part in the election, Tilden's 184 electoral votes would have given him the presidency with none of the disputed electoral votes claimed by both parties after the November popular balloting. In June 1874 the Republican House of Representatives had passed a bill for Colorado's statehood. Holt notes: "there is no evidence from the debates that congressional Republicans had any idea that Colorado's admission might affect the outcome of the 1876 presidential election." Nonetheless, he argues, "their motives can be readily inferred," and when the Senate considered the bill in February 1875, "its partisan implications were far clearer" (pp. 28, 30). This assertion should inspire future scholars to explore further the meaning and intent of the Colorado statehood effort. Whatever the Republicans' purpose, it is clear that in the absence of Colorado statehood and of the near certainty that the next GOP presidential nominee would receive the state's three electoral votes, Republican strategists would have felt increased pressure to do everything possible to capture at least one northern swing state. They could have prevailed with Indiana, which Tilden carried by a scant margin of 1.6 percent, or Connecticut, where a change of fewer than 1,500 votes would have given Hayes six more electoral votes, a ten-vote margin over Tilden, and the presidency.

Hayes trailed Tilden in the popular vote by more than 250,000, or 3 percentage points, and history records him as a "minority president." Even so, Holt describes the Ohioan's victory (and the substantial GOP gains in congressional races) as "a truly astonishing comeback by the Republican party"—especially in the North—from the party's dismal showing in recent elections (p. xiii). Explaining this reversal of ill fortune for the Republicans lies at the heart of Holt's purpose...