History News Service

Why We Shouldn't Worry So Much

By Donald R. Shaffer
History News Service

In recent weeks, Democrats and Republicans have repeatedly traded charges of skullduggery in Florida's disputed presidential election. Democrats have accused Republicans of intimidating minority voters, using an arbitrary deadline to frustrate hand recounts and even organizing crowds of protesters to bully local election officials and falsely suggest public outrage.

Republicans have charged Democrats with abusing the judicial process to usurp the existing authority of the Florida legislature and secretary of state, plotting to invalidate military absentee ballots, and manipulating hand recounts to manufacture votes for Al Gore.

Even as the dispute headed to the U.S. Supreme Court, escalating rhetoric and the contested election's growing complexity increased fears that the nation had blundered into an insoluble constitutional crisis.

While the predicament justifiably raised concerns about the accuracy of election technology, history suggests we shouldn't worry so much about a constitutional crisis. The United States successfully weathered such a crisis during the infamous presidential election of 1876.

Consider the events that occurred in that election. It took place only a decade after the Civil War. The residual sectional hatred from that conflict makes the current partisan bitterness seem tame by comparison. For instance, the Republicans' main electoral strategy that year was "waving the bloody shirt" (literally displaying the bloody uniforms of northern soldiers at campaign rallies). By doing so, they symbolically blamed the Democrats for the war's 620,000 dead.

The 1876 election also was arguably the most violent in American history. White southerners, associated with the Democrats, committed large-scale violence and fraud to disenfranchise African Americans. Their purpose was to unseat the few remaining state governments in the region controlled by the Republicans, whose main supporters were black.

As in 2000, the Democratic candidate, Samuel J. Tilden, won a narrow popular-vote majority nationwide over the Republican candidate, Rutherford B. Hayes. However, in 1876, a dispute erupted over the electoral votes of not just one state, but three: Florida, Louisiana and South Carolina. The violence and fraud, rather than punch cards, made it exceedingly unclear which party had won those states.

As in 2000, the disputed electoral votes in 1876 became critical to the election's outcome. Tilden had won 184 undisputed electoral votes to Hayes's 166. Yet with the combined 19 electoral votes of the three states still in doubt, it remained mathematically possible for Hayes to squeak by Tilden.

Consequently, both parties frantically scrambled for those votes. Election boards in the three disputed states, controlled by the Republicans, declared Hayes the victor. Democrats understandably did not accept those rulings, and the parties submitted separate electoral votes to Congress.

Believing the Constitution offered no guidance for a settlement, Congress established an electoral commission to decide the disputed electoral votes. The body was composed of ten members of Congress (five from each party) and five U.S. Supreme Court justices. The justices included two Republicans, two Democrats and an independent, David Davis. Soon thereafter, a coalition of Democrats and Greenbackers (a minor party) from Illinois offered Davis a U.S. Senate seat. He resigned and was replaced by a Republican justice, Joseph P. Bradley. The commission went on to award Hayes the disputed electoral votes by 8-7 party-line tallies, and he won the Electoral College by one vote (185-184).

Even before taking office, Hayes mollified the Democrats by abandoning Republicans in the South. This decision enabled the Democratic Party to declare victory in the elections for state offices in Florida, Louisiana and South Carolina and allowed the reestablishment of white supremacy there. The disputed 1876 election passed into history, although its result would haunt African Americans for a century.

If the United States could survive 1876, however untidily, surely it can endure in the current controversy. Elections are more transparent now than they were 124 years ago. Neither side can afford to engage in the ruthless violence and widespread fraud of 1876, and happily neither has done so. The 24-hour media, however faulty, would quickly bring such crimes to light.

Indeed, resorting to the courts actually is a good sign. It signifies a basic respect by both political parties for the rule of law, however much they push the law at its edges. Citizens will not have to rally by the hundreds of thousands, as occurred in the recent Yugoslavian presidential election, to face down Al Gore or George W. Bush. Sooner or later, Gore or Bush (probably the former) will bow reluctantly to judicial authority and public opinion. In that thought Americans should take comfort.

Donald R. Shaffer teaches 19th-century U.S. history at the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley, and is a writer for the History News Service.

[Donald R. Shaffer, Department of History, Michener L88, University of Northern Colorado, Greeley, CO 80639. Telephone: (970) 351-2112; fax: (970) 351-2199; e-mail: drshaff@unco.edu; URL: http://www.unco.edu/drshaff.]