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“Go South, Young Man”
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During
the disputed presidential election of 1876, both parties sent officials
to the Southern states with contested results in order to prevent the
other party from committing (more) fraud and to ensure that their party
won the count. This cartoon
by Republican Thomas Nast lampoons the Democrats for sending
their partisans south. The
cartoon’s title, “Go South, Young Man,” is a play on the words of
advice associated with the late Horace Greeley, editor of the New
York Tribune and 1872 Democratic/Liberal Republican
presidential
nominee: “Go
West, young man.”
The first returns on election
day, Tuesday, November 7, 1876, indicated a clear victory for the
Democratic presidential nominee, Governor Samuel J. Tilden of New York,
over his Republican opponent, Governor Rutherford B. Hayes of Ohio.
However, as the evening wore on, it became apparent that the
outcome of the presidential election was uncertain.
When the dust settled, Tilden had won the popular vote, with
4,284,020 (51%) to Hayes’s 4,036,572 (48%), a margin of less than
250,000. The only thing that mattered, though, was the Electoral
College count, and there, Tilden’s 184 electoral votes were one short
of a majority, while Hayes’s 165 electoral votes left him 20 ballots
shy of the presidency. The
remaining 20 electoral votes were in dispute:
one from Oregon and 19 from the three Southern states which still
retained Reconstruction governments—Florida (4), Louisiana (8), and
South Carolina (7).
In the three Southern states,
both parties were claiming victory in close elections and charging the
other party with vote fraud. As
the party in power in those states, the Republicans had a majority on
the returning boards, which would certify the election results.
They threw out enough Democratic votes to give the election in
their states to Hayes and the Republican gubernatorial candidates.
In Louisiana and South Carolina, Democrats declared their
gubernatorial candidates elected, established rival state
administrations, and certified Tilden the winner in their states.
In Florida, the state supreme court ruled in favor of the
Democratic gubernatorial candidate, but let Hayes’s margin of victory
stand. The new Florida
governor, however, promptly appointed a Democratic returning board,
which announced that Tilden had carried the state.
In Oregon, Democrats disputed a Republican elector on a
technicality.
In the featured cartoon,
Democratic national chairman, Congressman Abram Hewitt of New York, has
dispatched John Hoffman, former New York governor, who sprints southward
while carrying orders for himself and Senator William Barnum of
Connecticut to buy or count one more electoral vote for Democrat Tilden.
The identification of Hoffman as the “counted in Governor
1868” refers to his
gubernatorial victory
in that year,
which was alleged to have occurred because the chairman of the state
Democratic party, none other than Samuel Tilden, knowingly allowed New
York Democrats to engage in vote fraud. The charges were never
substantiated.
The
figure in the right-background is
John Morrissey, former
champion prizefighter and head of the Irving Hall political machine in
New York City. Morrissey was a longtime supporter of Tilden. Since
Morrissey’s former machine affiliation, Tammany Hall, represented the
epitome of political corruption to cartoonist Thomas Nast, the artist
continued to associate Morrissey with both Tammany Hall and Tilden in
order to connect the Democratic nominee to Tammany Hall. The linkage
with corrupt machine politics is further emphasized by the poster in the
background which claims that Tammany Hall’s notorious former boss,
William Tweed, who died in 1875, was also “going South” (perhaps
also a metaphor for Hell). The mention in the other poster of betting
pools on the presidential race is an allusion to Morrissey’s ownership
of several successful gambling houses.
In
fact, members of both parties were susceptible to charges of corruption.
The head of Louisiana’s returning board, James Madison Wells,
tried to sell the state’s electoral votes locally at a price of
$200,000 for each Republican board member, but both parties rejected the
corrupt deal. However,
Tilden’s nephew, Colonel William Pelton, did negotiate with Wells and
with Republicans in Florida in an attempt to buy an Electoral College
victory for his uncle, allegedly without the nominee’s knowledge, even
though he lived in his uncle’s house.
The negotiations lasted too long to produce results, except for a
series of incriminating coded telegrams, which were later used as
evidence in a
Congressional investigation
in 1878.
Since
the United States Constitution did not provide for the unprecedented
situation, Congress appointed select House and Senate committees, which
proposed establishing a bipartisan, multi-institutional commission to
decide the legitimacy of the disputed electoral votes.
Congress enacted the Electoral Commission Act in late January
1877, and appointed 5 members each from the Supreme Court, the Senate,
and the House. The
membership was divided evenly between Republicans and Democrats until
the lone independent, Justice David Davis, resigned to accept election
to the Senate. His
replacement was Justice Joseph Bradley, a Republican.
Meeting throughout February, the Electoral Commission awarded, on
a party-line vote (8-7), all the disputed 20 votes to the Republicans.
After heated debate, Congress accepted the commission’s results
on March 2, and on Monday, March 5, 1877, Rutherford B. Hayes was sworn
in publicly as president of the United States.
For
more cartoons and information, see HarpWeek’s Website on the Electoral
College Controversy.
Robert C. Kennedy
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