Almost President (45 page)

How, then, did Seymour fare so well against Grant? Stephen Douglas and George McClellan had maintained the integrity of the Democratic Party, while many Americans, North as well as South, had no commitment to racial equality and were wary of the Radical Republican agenda. They wanted less excitement in their politics, and Seymour promised that.

Eric Foner,
Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877
(Harper and Row, New York, 1988).

Stewart Mitchell,
Horatio Seymour of New York
(Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1938).

HORACE GREELEY

1872

No losing presidential candidate suffered more from his loss than crusading newspaper editor Horace Greeley. Five days before he decisively lost his 1872 race against President Ulysses S. Grant, Greeley's wife of thirty-five years, Mary, a brilliant but often disagreeable woman, died. Within a week of the election, Greeley learned he had lost control of his beloved newspaper, the
New York
Tribune
. On November 29, just twenty-four days after the election, Greeley died of what was described as “brain fever.” His last words were, “It is done.”

At Greeley's funeral, the renowned minister Henry Ward Beecher eulogized: “He was the feet for the lame; he was the tongue for the dumb; he was an eye for the blind; and had a heart for those who had none to sympathize with them.” So great was his influence among the American masses that Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of many writers whom Greeley made famous, said the blunt “Uncle Horace” did many Americans' thinking for them, and for just the two dollars per year it cost them to subscribe to the
Tribune—
which by 1860 had the largest circulation of any newspaper in the world and which still exists as the
International
Herald-Tribune
.

Described by
Harper's Weekly
as “the most perfect Yankee the country ever produced,” Greeley was a Universalist who believed everyone could achieve salvation. He was so odd and angular in appearance that one wag said Greeley made Lincoln appear “debonair.” His views were as eccentric as his looks; he advocated such social reforms as vegetarianism, temperance, the abolition of capital punishment, and various social utopian experiments, including one in Colorado named for him. He likely never said the quote most attributed to him—“Go West, young man!”—even though he wholeheartedly agreed with the sentiment.

First a Whig, he was a founding member of the Republican Party. He cheered the North into war and was initially extremely critical of Lincoln for dawdling on emancipation. Midway through the conflict, he seemed to change course and urged Lincoln to seek a negotiated peace with the South, even personally seeking out a foreign mediator. After the war, he helped make bail for jailed Confederate president Jefferson Davis out of what he said was Christian compassion and anger that the government was holding Davis, in violation of his constitutional rights, without any specific charges.

Supportive of Grant's presidency at first, Greeley became disillusioned by Reconstruction and corruption within Grant's administration. He helped form a splinter group, labeled the Liberal Republicans, which held a rump convention and nominated for president the incorruptible Greeley. But he was no third party candidate; the Democrats could find no one better and shockingly chose Greeley, their longtime adversary, to be their standard-bearer as well. The Republican campaign against the “traitor” Greeley was merciless and he carried only six states, but because he died before the Electoral College convened, he technically received not a single electoral vote.

Kenneth Cmiel,
Democratic Eloquence: The Fight over Popular Speech in Nineteenth-Century America
(William Morrow and Co., New York, 1990).

Horace Greeley,
Recollections of a Busy Life
(J. B. Ford and Co., New York, 1868).

William Harlan Hale,
Horace Greeley: Voice of the People
(Harper & Bros., New York, 1950).

Robert C. Williams,
Horace Greeley: Champion of American Freedom
(New York University Press, New York and London, 2006).

SAMUEL J. TILDEN

1876

A presidential candidate who averted a second civil war would seem heroic, but Samuel J. Tilden was instead criticized for not forcefully claiming a presidency many believed was rightfully his. Our leaders, it seems, are valued more for their aggressiveness than their restraint.

The 1876 election, held during the national Centennial, had the highest voter turnout rate in history at 82 percent. Tilden, then governor of New York, won 51 percent of the popular vote to Republican Rutherford B. Hayes's 48 percent. But Tilden was denied the presidency when he lost the Electoral College by a single vote.

Tilden had gone to bed election night certain that he was the next president. He had already won 184 of the 185 electoral votes he needed for victory. He had carried the South except for three states that had not yet reported their returns: Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina. Winning any one of the three would ensure victory.

Election Night, most Republican Party officials had gotten drunk to dull the pain of expected defeat when Dan Sickles, a former New York congressman and Union general once acquitted of murder, walked into Republican headquarters and grasped the opportunity at hand. Without any authority to do so, Sickles wired Republican election officials in the three outstanding states and demanded, “Hold your states!” Republican election officials announced the next day that Hayes had eked out razor-thin victories in all three places.

State Democratic officials were outraged by this apparent fraud and submitted slates of rival electors pledged to Tilden. But if the Republicans committed fraud, they did so with a clear conscience. Tilden's margin of victory in the South was due in considerable part to violence and intimidation by armed whites to keep freed blacks from voting.

This infringement on the constitutional rights of African Americans did not trouble Democrats, South or North. To their mind, their candidate had been robbed. Mobs gathered across the country to chant “Tilden or blood!” President Grant fortified the nation's capital with additional troops, and gunboats patrolled the Potomac. Armed clubs, called “Tilden Minutemen,” formed in a dozen states, ready to march on Washington whenever Tilden gave the word. But he never did.

A bookish, sickly child, prone to hypochondria and never married, Tilden, it was said, had admirers, not friends. He had displayed great courage and ingenuity in bringing down Boss Tweed as part of a reform campaign in New York. But after the presidential election, Tilden went into seclusion, saying no more than to urge calm. He occupied his time by preparing a legal brief on the precedent for counting presidential ballots, certain he would win the presidency on the legal merits. Tilden's “fatal flaw,” says a character in Gore Vidal's novel about the election,
1876,
was that he possessed the “curious notion that men can be compelled by good argument to be honest.”

Tilden declined to sanction mass protests on his behalf, let alone armed insurrection. His “sphinx-like” behavior befuddled his supporters. A Southern Democrat complained Tilden was “a bag of mush.”

The Constitution is silent on what happens when the Electoral College votes are in dispute. Congress's solution in 1876 was the creation of an unprecedented election commission composed of members of Congress and the Supreme Court. The commission began politically balanced but lost its one allegedly independent member, Justice David Davis, when he suddenly accepted election by the Republican-controlled Illinois Legislature to the U.S. Senate. Another Republican jurist replaced Davis, and on a straight 8-7 party-line vote the commission gave all three outstanding states' electors to Hayes.

Yet, Southern Democrats no longer threatened renewed civil war, and it was clear a secret deal had been made when Hayes, shortly after assuming office, pulled federal troops out of the South and ended Reconstruction. Though he, too, believed that he had been defrauded, Tilden told supporters to “be of good cheer. The Republic will live.” He thought he would get another chance in 1880, but Democrats, disillusioned by Tilden's lack of fight, chose General Winfield Scott Hancock instead.

Tilden had made a fortune as a Wall Street attorney and he bequeathed the majority of it to help start the New York Public Library. When he died, he asked that his tombstone carry the inscription, “I Still Trust in The People.”

Eric Foner,
Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877
(Harper and Row, New York, 1988).

Michael F. Holt,
By One Vote: The Disputed Presidential Election of 1876
(University Press of Kansas, Lawrence, 2008).

William H. Rehnquist,
Centennial Crisis: The Disputed Election of 1876
(Vintage Books, New York, 2004).

Gore Vidal,
1876: A Novel
(Vintage International, New York, 2000).

WINFIELD SCOTT HANCOCK

1880

Americans love bestowing nicknames, particularly on politicians. Those unfortunate enough to have been tagged “Tricky Dick” or “Slick Willie” would certainly envy Winfield Scott Hancock for being known as “The Superb.” George McClellan gave that handle to Hancock for his work at the relatively minor Battle of Williamsburg during McClellan's Peninsula campaign in the second year of the Civil War. Few men could carry such a title without embarrassment or irony, but such was Hancock's character that it seemed a natural and honest description of the man.

He was a corps commander throughout the war without responsibility for devising strategy, but his performance and personal courage at Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, and Spotsylvania won plaudits and the deep affection of his troops. Ulysses S. Grant claimed in his memoirs that Hancock never made a blunder in battle, while William T. Sherman called Hancock “one of the greatest soldiers in history.”

When he died in 1886, the
New York Evening Post,
which had supported James Garfield over Hancock in the 1880 presidential election, said Hancock was the most beloved and admired commander on either side during the Civil War. The affection felt for Hancock in the South was due largely to his tour of duty as military commander of Louisiana and Texas during Reconstruction, where he announced, to the anger of Radical Republicans, his goal of restoring civil liberties and returning civil authority as quickly as possible back to reconstructed Confederates.

Why Hancock had been named after a military hero is unclear, because when the local congressman nominated Hancock for West Point, his father, a devout Christian and Democrat, opposed the idea. He yielded when convinced that if the world needed soldiers, they should at least be Christian ones.

Based on his service during the war and on the frontier, and because of his appeal in the South, Hancock was considered a strong presidential candidate who could neutralize the Republicans' post-war campaign strategy of “waving the bloody shirt.” But he lost the nomination in 1868 and again in 1876. His turn finally came in 1880.