of our citizens were thronging the exposition grounds at Philadelphia to view the triumphs of civilization, the savages on our Western plains furnished a shocking demonstration of the ill fortune and ineptitude which seemed to attend all our efforts to deal with the Indian tribes. On June 25, 1876, General George A. Custer, with 264 men, attacking what he supposed to be a small detachment of Sioux Indians near the junction of the Big Horn and the Little Big Horn Rivers, in the present state of Montana, found himself surrounded by all the warriors of the tribe, under their chief, Sitting Bull, and was cut down with every man in his command.

But even more disheartening than panic and massacre was the persistence in the centennial year of corruption in high places. There was grave apprehension in the minds of the Republicans as the time of the election approached. The Crédit Mobilier, the Sanborn contracts, and the "salary grab" were not yet forgotten. The prosecution of the whisky frauds was following a nauseous trail almost to the doors of the White House. On March 2, 1876, W. W. Belknap, the Secretary of War, was impeached by a unanimous vote of the House for having received, with Mrs. Belknap, some $20,000 in graft from the sale of privileges at valuable government trading posts in the Indian Territory. Belknap escaped formal condemnation by the Senate, but at the same time confessed his guilt by hast

1 From 1865 to 1890 we fought a dozen Indian wars at an expense of $25,000,000, and with a loss of over 1000 men.

2 We have already noted Senator Hoar's lament over the situation (p. 55). James Russell Lowell, in lines of stinging irony, which contrast strangely with Whittier's pious stanzas, makes Brother Jonathan advise

"Columbia, puzzled what she should display

Of true home make on her Centennial day,"

to exhibit her civil-service scandals, her miscarriages of justice, her financial heresies, her "rings" and grafters,

"And challenge Europe to produce such things. . .

She'll find it hard to hide her spiteful tears

At such advance in one poor hundred years."

ily resigning on the very day that impeachment was voted.' It was under such a moral handicap that the party entered on the campaign of 1876. Many of the "Stalwart" administration leaders-like Conkling, Cameron, Butler, and Chandlerwanted Grant nominated for a third term, believing that only the popularity of the great war hero could save the party from defeat. And Grant himself met the suggestion with the equivocal protest: "I do not want a third term any more than I wanted a first. . . . I would not accept a nomination unless it should come under such circumstances as to make it an imperative duty." But a resolution adopted by the House in December, 1875, by the decisive vote of 233 to 18, to the effect that a third term would be "unwise, unpatriotic, and fraught with peril to our free institutions," spiked the guns of the Grant boom.

The Republican convention, which met at Cincinnati on June 14, 1876, was for the first time since 1860 to witness a contest for the nomination. James G. Blaine of Maine was the favorite of the convention. He was nominated by the great orator Robert G. Ingersoll in an impassioned speech dwelling on the issues of the war. Blaine was the man who had "torn from the throat of treason the tongue of slander" and "snatched the mask of Democracy from the hideous face of rebellion." "Like an armed warrior, like a plumed knight," Blaine had "marched down the halls of the American Congress" and thrown his shining lance "full and fair against the brazen forehead of every traitor to his country and every maligner of his fair reputation." It was a magnificent effort to drown the voices of protest in a burst of patriotic oratory; and had the balloting begun then and there, under the spell of Ingersoll's

1 President Grant, with characteristic misplaced "loyalty" to friends under fire, immediately accepted Belknap's resignation "with great regret," even as he had the month before prevented his private secretary Babcock's conviction in the whisky frauds by personal intervention in his behalf.

2 The references were to Blaine's motion, in January, 1876, to refuse amnesty to Jefferson Davis, "as the author, knowingly, deliberately, guiltily, and wilfully, of the gigantic murders and crimes at Andersonville"; and to Blaine's spectacular ex parte defense, on the floor of the House (June 5), of his conduct in regard to certain questionable transactions in railroad bonds.

compelling voice, Blaine would have undoubtedly secured the nomination. But the day passed in the presentation of other candidates. When the voting began on the morrow, Blaine was far in the lead, and for the first six ballots maintained his advantage over all the other contestants, although the support of the administration "machine" was given to the Stalwart candidates Conkling and Morton. Secretary Bristow, the prosecutor of the whisky ring, was the candidate of the reform element of the party, and stood next to Blaine and Morton on the first two ballots, and second only to Blaine (but with less than half Blaine's strength) on the next three ballots. Senator Morton, the able war governor of Indiana, and Roscoe Conkling, the imperious senator from New York, declined slowly but steadily from their initial strength of 125 and 99 votes respectively, until, on the seventh ballot, their votes were distrib uted between Blaine and Hayes. The latter, starting a poor fifth, with 61 votes from 9 states, as against Blaine's 285 votes from 36 states and territories, showed little gain until the delegates from Michigan gave him their 22 votes on the fifth ballot. Then there began a drift toward Hayes, which on the seventh ballot swelled into a flood tide, carrying him into the nomination.1

Rutherford B. Hayes at the time of his nomination was serving his third term as governor of Ohio. He was a man of sterling character and solid attainments. Without the brilliancy of Blaine or the audacity of Conkling, he had inherited from generations of New England ancestry a habit of industry, a deliberation of judgment, a scrupulousness of conduct which never failed him. A steadily increasing law practice in Cincinnati, with wise investments in real estate, had brought him, first, ease

1 The votes for the chief contestants were as follows:

For a choice 368 votes were necessary. It was really Blaine's bitter enemy Conkling who defeated him for the nomination, since 61 of New York's votes were cast for Hayes on the final ballot.

and then wealth. Conspicuously gallant service as colonel of an Ohio regiment of volunteers in the campaigns in western Virginia, Maryland, and the Shenandoah Valley had earned him a brevet major generalship at the close of the war. He was elected to Congress in 1865, and then to the governorship of Ohio in 1867, 1869, and 1875. Every political honor, even to the supreme honor of the country, came to him unsought, found him prepared, and left him more respected. There was no hint of demagogism, smartness, or suspicious subtlety in his public career. He was a living exemplar of his maxim, "He serves his party best who serves his country best." If he gave offense, it was the offense of Aristides-the statesman embarrassingly just.

To carry the Republican party to victory in 1876 seemed like a hopeless task. "If confidence in the Democrats had been as strong as disgust with the Republicans," says Haworth, "there would have been little need of holding an election." But the Democratic party in the North and West had not yet wholly lived down its reputation for sympathy with rebellion. Furthermore, the Democratic candidate, Samuel J. Tilden of New York, in spite of his good work in exposing the rascality of the Tweed Ring, was open to objection as a shifty lawyer-politician who had shown too great servility to corporate interests and too little conscience in making out his income-tax returns. He was mercilessly pilloried by the Republican cartoonist, Thomas Nast, as too busy with a railroad case to hear the call of his country in 1861, but with ample leisure and funds to devote to his political ambitions fifteen years later.

As the election returns came in during the night of November 7, it seemed certain that Tilden was elected. He had carried the "doubtful states" of the North,-Indiana, Connecticut, New York, and New Jersey,-which, with the sure Democratic states of the South, gave him 184 votes, or only one less than the needed majority. The 19 votes of Louisiana, South Carolina, and Florida were in doubt; also the vote of one Republican elector in Oregon, who was discovered to be ineligible because he held a postmastership (Constitution, Art. II, sect. 1, par. 2). Hayes himself believed that he was defeated; but the

day after the election Zachary Chandler, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, boldly claimed every disputed vote, and the New York Times posted the bulletin: Hayes, 185; Tilden, 184. There was no doubt of the fair claim of Hayes to the Oregon vote, but he needed every one of the disputed Southern votes to win. Louisiana, South Carolina, and Florida had all sent in a double set of returns. There was no machinery in our government for deciding which sets were valid. The Constitution prescribes that "the president of the Senate shall, in the presence of the Senate and the House of Representatives, open all the certificates, and the votes shall then be counted." The Senate was Republican in January, 1877, and the House was Democratic. Evidently, if the Republican president of the Senate, T. W. Ferry of Michigan, was empowered to open such certificates and count such votes as he saw fit, Hayes would be elected. If, on the other hand, the disputed votes were thrown out, Tilden would still lack one vote of the majority, and the election would be thrown into the Democratic House, where Tilden would be chosen. A joint rule had been adopted by Congress in 1865 providing that if either House objected to the count of the vote from any state, that vote must be thrown out. But the Senate had rescinded this rule in 1876, and no substitute had been passed. The situation, therefore, was a complete deadlock. The time for the inauguration of a new president was drawing near. Unless some solution could be found before March 4, there was danger of the anarchy of an interregnum and even of civil war.1

A joint committee of Congress sitting on the situation recommended the creation of a tribunal to hear the arguments for each set of returns and to decide which votes should be counted. The act passed late in January, on the recommendation of this committee, set up an Electoral Commission composed of three Republicans and two Democrats from the Senate, three Democrats and two Republicans from the House, two Democrats and

1 For various "dire predictions" of civil war see Rhodes, Vol. VII, p. 242. "Henry Watterson announced in the Louisville Courier Journal that 100,000 unarmed citizens would march to Washington to maintain the rights of Tilden."