Samuel Tilden and the Election of 1876

By Silence Dogood

Last week, we unfortunately saw a fire break out in Fort Tilden, destroying a well-known observation deck located atop one of the decommissioned batteries speckled throughout the fort. But all is not lost. As reported by The Rockaway Times, those involved in such matters have vowed to rebuild the observation deck and return it to its former glory.

One small, and perhaps selfish, silver lining of the event is that it got me thinking about the next topic for “This American Experiment.” Fort Tilden is, of course, named in honor of former New York Governor Samuel Tilden. What better time to dive a little deeper into one of New York’s most prolific political figures and, possibly, the man who came closest to becoming president without ever fully reaching the highest office in the land?

Samuel J. Tilden was born in New Lebanon, New York, in 1814. Born into a family with connections in New York politics, Tilden became an ardent supporter of fellow New York native Martin Van Buren and the Democratic Party.

After attending Yale University and studying law at New York University, Tilden began a very successful career as a corporate lawyer, primarily representing railroads, which were exploding in popularity across the country. Tilden became exceedingly wealthy in this pursuit and soon rose to prominence within New York’s high society.

Throughout the 1840s, Tilden held several political positions in New York, serving briefly as New York City’s corporate counsel and as a state assemblyman representing the city. In 1844, he was a representative to the Democratic National Convention, which nominated James K. Polk in lieu of Tilden’s political hero, Martin Van Buren.

During this time, Tilden became a leading member of a faction known as the “Barnburners”—a group of largely anti-slavery New York Democrats.

In 1848, Tilden helped organize a third party known as the Free Soil Party. The Free Soilers were mostly northern Democrats opposed to the expansion of slavery into western territories. Their convention would go on to nominate Martin Van Buren for president as a third-party candidate. In the election of 1848, Van Buren drew a significant number of votes away from Democratic nominee Lewis Cass, helping Zachary Taylor of the Whig Party win the presidency.

As tensions over slavery intensified in the years that followed, Tilden did not go so far as to join the new Republican Party like many other northern Democrats, but he did distance himself from Democratic presidents such as Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan.

Tilden strongly opposed the candidacy of Abraham Lincoln in 1860. He believed—correctly, as it turned out—that Lincoln’s election would trigger the secession of the southern states.

When those states did, in fact, secede following Lincoln’s victory, Tilden nevertheless supported the Union and its cause during the American Civil War. During the war, he managed Democrat Horatio Seymour’s campaign for governor of New York and later played a significant role in George B. McClellan’s unsuccessful presidential campaign in 1864.

Following the war, Tilden’s growing influence within Democratic Party politics helped propel him to the chairmanship of the New York State Democratic Committee. During this period, Tilden increasingly found himself at odds with the machine politics of Tammany Hall, which was led by the infamous William M. Tweed, better known as “Boss Tweed.”

The reform-minded Tilden launched a campaign against Tweed and his system of bribery, patronage, and political corruption. This culminated in Tilden running for the New York State Assembly as essentially an anti-Tweed Democrat. Tilden and other reform candidates enjoyed enormous success in that election. Following an investigation into the Tweed Ring that Tilden helped lead, Boss Tweed was indicted on more than 100 counts of corruption, convicted, and ultimately imprisoned.

The fame that came with defeating Tweed and dismantling the Tammany Hall machine dramatically increased Tilden’s political clout in New York. It helped carry him to the governorship in 1874 and raised his national profile, making him the ideal choice for Democrats to nominate for president in the election of 1876.

Although little spoken of today, the election of 1876 — falling on the centennial year of the founding of the nation — is one of the most fascinating and controversial events in United States history.

To set the scene, the American Civil War had ended just over a decade earlier, and Reconstruction in the South, for better or worse, was well underway. Since the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860, Republicans had controlled the presidency. The election of 1876 seemed like the perfect opportunity for Democrats to change that with Samuel Tilden, a reform-minded, Union-supporting northern governor representing the Democratic Party. Tilden secured his party’s nomination on the second ballot at the convention.

He would face Republican nominee Rutherford B. Hayes, a Civil War hero and governor of Ohio.

On a national scale, Hayes was something of a political unknown. Tilden, on the other hand, had gained widespread fame for his role in dismantling the corrupt political machine run by Tweed in New York City.

To oversimplify things slightly, the election largely revolved around how the nation should continue dealing with the South and Reconstruction in the years following the Civil War.

In order to win the presidency in 1876, a candidate needed 185 electoral votes. When the votes were counted on election night, Tilden had dominated the popular vote, winning by roughly 250,000 votes. In the Electoral College, Hayes had secured 165 votes while Tilden had 184, leaving the Democratic candidate just one vote shy of the presidency.

However, 20 electoral votes remained unresolved, coming from four states: Florida, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Oregon.

On election night, both Tilden and Hayes went to bed believing that Tilden would soon be declared the 19th President of the United States.

At 165 electoral votes, Hayes would need all 20 disputed votes to reach the magic number of 185. Tilden, meanwhile, needed just one.

Notably, three of the four disputed states had been members of the Confederate States of America.

In each of the contested states, both sides declared victory. Republicans in the South accused Democrats of suppressing the votes of newly enfranchised African American voters through intimidation and violence. Democrats, conversely, alleged that federal troops stationed in the states as part of Reconstruction were helping manipulate vote counts in favor of Republicans.

Ultimately, rival governments in the disputed states each sent their own electors to Washington. This created an unprecedented constitutional crisis, as there was no clear mechanism in the Constitution for resolving such a dispute.

To break the deadlock, Congress created a special electoral commission. The bipartisan body consisted of five members of the House of Representatives, five U.S. senators, and five justices of the Supreme Court. In practice, the commission ended up with eight Republicans and seven Democrats.

The commission reviewed each of the disputed electoral votes. In every case, the decision fell along strict party lines: eight votes to seven in favor of the Republican electors. All twenty disputed votes were ultimately awarded to Hayes, giving him 185 electoral votes to Tilden’s 184.

The decision sent Democrats in Congress into a tizzy. Many were determined to block Hayes’ victory, raising the specter of yet another constitutional crisis. That is, until the Compromise of 1877.

Under the compromise, Democrats agreed not to block Hayes from taking office on several conditions. Most importantly, they demanded that federal troops be withdrawn from the South and that the Republican Reconstruction governments in the region be dismantled and replaced with locally elected ones. In effect, Reconstruction in the South would come to an end.

Hayes and the Republicans ultimately agreed to the deal.

To his credit, Samuel Tilden handled the situation as well as anyone could have. Some Democrats urged him to reject the commission’s findings, declare victory, and take the oath of office himself. Tilden dismissed such ideas and ultimately conceded.

On March 2, 1877, Congress officially certified the election results, awarding Rutherford Hayes 185 electoral votes to Tilden’s 184. Two days later, on March 4, Hayes was sworn in as the 19th President of the United States.

The end of Reconstruction in the South proved devastating to the civil liberties of Black Americans. With federal oversight withdrawn, many former Confederates quickly returned to positions of political power. Over the following decades, Southern states imposed a system of racial segregation and disenfranchisement known as Jim Crow laws, ushering in nearly a century of legalized discrimination.

After the election, Tilden famously reflected: “I can retire to private life with the consciousness that I shall receive from posterity the credit of having been elected to the highest position in the gift of the people, without any of the cares and responsibilities of the office.”

In the years immediately following the election, Tilden was widely considered the presumptive Democratic nominee for future presidential contests. But declining health ultimately prevented him from running again, and he declined to seek the nomination in both 1880 and 1884. He retired from politics and lived out the remainder of his life at his home in Yonkers. Tilden died in 1886 and was buried in his hometown of New Lebanon.

Poetically, Tilden’s gravestone bears the inscription: “I Still Trust The People.”

Rockaway’s fort namesake, Samuel Tilden, came closer than almost any other non-president to holding the highest office in the land. Though he never occupied the White House, he nonetheless played a dramatic role in shaping this American experiment. It seems only fitting that the local landmark bearing the name of this man of the people now sits beside what many call “The People’s Beach.”