The month of November often ends on a note of thanksgiving that leads to the glory of the Christmas season and the promise of a new year to come. This November, however, has been fraught with problems that will forever be seared into our collective consciousness.
It started with an election that seemed to go on forever, as President Trump debated about the results, claiming fraud as he took to a constant Twitter tirade that demanded the votes be recounted in key states as the Electoral College votes clearly showed Joe Biden as the winner, with 306 to 232, even showing that Biden clearly won 7 million more popular votes. Then, it ended with a rise in Covid-19 cases and a president refusing to concede while continuing to claim election fraud.
That being said, November 2020, like the rest of the year, will be something the entire nation is ready to see come to an end as the calendar turns to December, marking the end of a particularly tumultuous time in the history of America.
Many people I run into on the street who read my posts often ask about my opinion on what they refer to as the closest presidential race in American history. I just shrug and continue on my way, knowing that the truth behind that question is yet another lie of American history, proving that we, as a nation, have failed - yet again - to learn from our past mistakes. There was a race that was even closer than the one through which we have just lived.
Around midnight on his way home from a play in New York City on Election Day in 1876, Daniel Sickles stopped by Republican national headquarters at Fifth Avenue Hotel. The place was nearly deserted. GOP presidential candidate Rutherford B. Hayes was losing so badly that the party chairman had gone to bed with a bottle of whiskey.
Sickles, a former Union general, noticed something about the early returns, which gave Democratic New York Governor Samuel J. Tilden a large lead. If four states where the results already were in dispute went to Hayes, he would win the presidency by one electoral vote. Sickles sent telegrams under the name of the sleeping party chairman to Republican leaders in the four contested states urging them to safeguard votes for Hayes.
Thus began the longest-fought and closest presidential election in United States history. Much as President Trump is doing now, backers of Hayes, the governor of Ohio, charged the election was being stolen. The difference was that, unlike now, there was clear evidence of fraud and voter intimidation. The outcome in the tense, post-Civil War atmosphere not only decided a presidency, but also led to nearly a century of racial segregation in the South.
The next day, Democratic newspapers trumpeted a Tilden victory.
But the Republican New York Times - citing disputed results in Florida, Louisiana, South Carolina and Oregon - declared, “The Results Still Uncertain.”
Back in Ohio, Hayes was pessimistic.
As the days passed, the uncertainty increased. Tilden led by more than 250,000 votes in the popular vote in the 38 states. But he was one vote short of the 185 electoral votes needed for victory. Hayes had 165 votes.
All eyes focused on charges of intimidation of black Republican voters in the three disputed Southern states (In Oregon, the issue was a disputed elector). Southern whites were rebelling against black political power granted under Reconstruction. Republican President Ulysses S. Grant had already sent federal troops to the states to help keep the peace.
In South Carolina, a majority black state, armed white men belonging to “rifle clubs” and dressed in red shirts had harassed Republicans. The “Red Shirts” killed six black men in the Hamburg massacre. The paramilitary group backed a former Confederate general for governor and threatened to kill Republican Governor Daniel Chamberlain.
On Election Day in Edgefield, South Carolina, more than 300 armed Red Shirts on horseback “packed their horses so closely together that the only approach to the windows, back of which was the ballot box, was under the bellies of the beasts,” Times said.
Voter intimidation was also rampant in Louisiana and Florida. Voter fraud was widespread on both sides. According to Rutherford B. Hayes Library, the Democrats used “repeaters,” who voted repeatedly. They printed fraudulent ballots to trick illiterate black voters into voting for Democrats, much like the email campaign used by Republicans in Georgia this year.
The national voter turnout was 81.8 percent, still the highest ever for a presidential election. But the number was clearly inflated. In South Carolina, the official turnout was 101 percent.
Republicans contended Hayes would have won easily with honest voting. A leading advocate was “Devil Dan” Sickles, who had campaigned for Hayes, a fellow Union general. Sickles had gained infamy in 1859 when, as a first-term congressman, he shot and killed his wife’s lover - the son of “Star-Spangled Banner” author Francis Scott Key - in broad daylight in the park across the street from the White House. Sickles became the first accused murderer acquitted because of temporary insanity.
On December 5, 1876, all the states sent their official results to Washington to be counted and announced by the president of the Senate. In the four contested states, Republican and Democratic officials filed separate tallies for Hayes or Tilden, throwing the election into chaos.
As now, Republicans controlled the Senate, and Democrats controlled the House. Finally, in late January, Congress created a 15-member Electoral Commission of five senators, five House members and five Supreme Court justices. The commission voted separately on the four disputed states. They awarded all the states - a total of 20 electoral votes - to Hayes by an 8-7 vote.
Now, Democrats charged the election was being stolen from Tilden. House Democrats began a filibuster. Amid cries of “Tilden or blood,” one Washington newspaper reported on plans “to send a threatening and bellicose mob to the National Capital to see that the count is made according to their wishes.”
Then on March 2 - nearly four months after the election and just two days before Inauguration Day - Congress reached agreement. After heated debate, at 4:10 a.m., the president of the Senate formally announced that Hayes had been elected the 19th president by an Electoral College vote of 185 to 184.
On March 3, Grant hosted Hayes at the White House, where he was sworn in as president by the chief justice. On March 5, there was a public inauguration ceremony.
Tilden continued to maintain “the country knows that I was legally elected president.” Dissidents dubbed Hayes “His Fraudulency.”
Historians differ on what ended the standoff. Many believe Republicans made a deal to appease Southern Democrats in a secret meeting at a Washington hotel owned by African American James Wormley. In his inauguration speech, Hayes said the time had come to allow the Southern states to govern themselves again. He soon withdrew federal troops from the South.
The rights of black citizens in the South were devastated as a result. White rule soon prevailed, ushering in Jim Crow laws and segregation.
Thirty years later, on the Senate floor, South Carolina’s Benjamin “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman, a leader of Red Shirts, boasted about the vote frauds of 1876.
“We set up the Democratic Party with one plank only, that this is White man’s country, and White men must govern it,” Tillman said. “Under that banner, we went to battle. It was then that we shot them. It was then that we killed them. It was then that ‘we stuffed ballot boxes,’ because this disease needed a strong remedy.”
How quickly we forget our history in this country.
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