the attention of the whole country by his vigorous, honest, and surpassingly able reform administration in that State, received more than a majority on the first ballot and the necessary two-thirds on the second, and was nominated amid great enthusiasm. Thomas A. Hendricks, who had contested for the first place with Mr. Tilden, was nominated for Vice-President. The platform adopted at St. Louis was a more distinctively Democratic platform than any upon which the party had planted itself since the nomination of Mr. Buchanan, and marks an epoch in the rehabilitation of the party. It demanded reform in every department of the public service, and in none more emphatically and clearly than in the sum and mode of federal taxation; it denounced the existing tariff, levied upon nearly 4,000 articles, as a masterpiece of injustice, inequality, and false pretense; "it has impoverished many industries to subsidize a few; it has prohibited imports that might purchase the products of American labor; it has degraded American commerce from the first to an inferior rank on the high seas; it has kept down the sale of American manufactures at home and abroad, and depleted the returns of American agriculture, an industry followed by half of our people; it costs the people five times more than it produces to the treasury; obstructs the processes of production and wastes the fruits of labor. We demand that all custom

house legislation shall be only for revenue."

The result at the polls gave Governor Tilden 4,300,590 votes, Governor Hayes 4,036,298 votes, and Peter Cooper, who had been nominated by the Greenback party, 81,737 votes. The Democrats had thus carried the election at the

polls and had an undoubted majority in the electoral college; and now begins the darkest chapter in the political history of our own country, and, indeed, of popular government in the world. In three of the Southern States-Louisiana, South Carolina and Florida-the Republican party still had control of the election machinery, through State Returning Boards, and as soon as it was discovered that Governor Tilden needed one vote from these States to elect him a conspiracy was organized by the Republican leaders to use the Returning Boards of these States, composed entirely of their own creatures, and generally of men of the most abandoned character, to defraud the Tilden electors of their certificates and to bestow them upon the Hayes electors. The successive steps by which this great political crime was accomplished will not be here narrated. Suffice it to say that in both Louisiana and Florida, where an undoubted majority of votes was cast for the Tilden electors, they threw out upon one or another pretext enough to reverse the result and gave the certificates to the Hayes electors. During the time when the canvassing of votes in these States was in progress certain "visiting statesmen," as they were called, went to them, professedly to see that a fair count was made; but if any Republican statesman, with the sole exception of General Barlow, of New York, exercised his influence in favor of a fair count, and not in favor of the larceny of the votes of these States by his party, the fact has never been disclosed. In addition to the moral support of these statesmen, United States soldiers were at hand to protect the Boards while engaged in the perpetration of this flagitious crime.

*

As there were disputed and double returns, when Congress met, the second session of the Forty-fourth Congress was chiefly devoted to this election contest, and a basis of agreement was finally settled upon in an act providing for a tribunal to be composed of five members of each House, selected by itself, and five justices of the Supreme Court of the United States, four of whom were designated in the act, with authority to choose the fifth, which constituted an Electoral Commission to decide, in all disputed cases, which was the true and lawful electoral vote of a State. This commission, as finally constituted, consisted, on the part of Congress, of Senators Edmunds, Morton, and Frelinghuysen, Republicans, and Senators Thurman and Bayard, Democrats, from the Senate; Messrs. Henry B. Paine, Eppa Hunton, Josiah G. Abbott, Democrats, and James A. Garfield and George F. Hoar, Republicans, from the House. The Justices of the Supreme Court designated in the act were Nathan Clifford, William Strong, Samuel F. Miller and Stephen G. Field, who chose as the fifth member Joseph P. Bradley. Politically, Clifford and Field were Democrats, and Miller, Strong and Bradley were Republicans. The commission was thus composed of eight Republicans and seven Democrats, and by this party vote, in which the Judges of the Supreme Court showed themselves as thorough partisans as the members of either House, every disputed question was decided in favor of the Republicans, and all the doubtful votes were given to

*Senator Thurman's health failed during the sitting of the Commission and his place was supplied by Senator Kernan.

Hayes, whereby he was declared to have had 185 votes to 184 for Tilden.

in

The Republican Senate and Democratic House not concurring to set aside the determination of the Commission any of the disputed cases, its judgment decided the contest and Rutherford B. Hayes was inaugurated President of the United States on the 4th day of March, 1877, and the first great Democratic victory went for naught. Among the first acts of the new President was to reward, with lucrative offices, the creatures who had been con-. cerned in the election frauds, and in the lottery of distribution the "visiting statesmen" were not overlooked, but were provided with foreign missions, cabinet appointments and other prominent positions.

WHILE

CHAPTER XVIII.

HISTORY UNDER PRESIDENT

HAYES, 1877-1881.

LE Mr. Hayes thus became President through the action of partisan Returning Boards in Louisiana and Florida, confirmed by the ruling of a partisan majority in the Electoral Commission, the Democratic State officers in both of these States, and eventually also in South Carolina, assumed possession of the State governments on the withdrawal of the federal troops, which took place soon after his inauguration, in accordance with an order previously given by President Grant and renewed by him. With the withdrawal of troops the era of Republican reconstruction and carpet-bagism closed in the South, and the race troubles, which had led to violence in some sections and added to political bitterness over the whole country, vanished, and the whites and blacks, living together in peaceful relations, laid the foundations of the prosperity of the new South, which has been so gratifying a feature of our political and industrial history in the past decade.

Although the Democrats had been deprived of their victory in the Presidential contest they found themselves with a majority in both Houses of the Forty-sixth Con