The Stolen Election by Lloyd Robinson

Author:Lloyd Robinson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

6

The Nation Chooses

Taking stock of the election situation in mid-October, the Republican leaders admitted that things looked bad for Hayes. If Tilden carried New York and its neighboring states, Indiana, and the entire South, he would be President. The Hayes men sought some way of prying loose some southern electoral votes for their candidate.

The place to look was the three carpetbagger states ruled by Republican governors. If these states could somehow be shifted into the Republican column on November 7, Hayes might win. But how? The whites of Louisiana, South Carolina, and Florida were determined to redeem their states this year. They were applying force to keep Negro Republicans away from the polls. Only through greater force could the Redeemers be defeated.

That was the answer: send in government troops! Use brigades of soldiers to decide the outcome of the election!

There had been racial trouble in South Carolina all summer. Massachusetts-born Daniel H. Chamberlain, the eloquent and conscientious Republican governor, had been unable to keep order. Thousands of armed whites belonging to rifle clubs roamed the state, systematically terrorizing Negro voters. The Negroes returned the violence, particularly in the eastern part of the state, where Negro field hands were on strike against the rice plantations for higher wages. Bands of these laborers harassed the non-striking workers and attacked whites at random. The fact that the Democrats had nominated a former Confederate general, Wade Hampton, to run against Chamberlain for governor, did not make matters less tense.

On September 16 there came a bloody collision between the races at the town of Ellenton. Other riots followed, and law and order broke down entirely in South Carolina. As chaos threatened, Governor Chamberlain asked President Grant to send Federal soldiers to restore peace in the troubled state.

Under similar circumstances, in 1875, Grant had refused to send troops to Mississippi, because it seemed politically unwise for him to extend the military suppression of the southern whites. Thus Mississippi had been redeemed. But now it was a presidential election year, and the Republicans were aware that if they lost South Carolina they would lose the election. Grant weighed all the political risks and dispatched the troops. On October 17, 1876, he issued a proclamation of insurrection and ordered thirty-three companies of Federal soldiers into South Carolina. This was nearly the whole defense force for the Atlantic seaboard. The soldiers spread out through the state in small squads and brought the rioting to an end.

Two weeks before Election Day, South Carolina was thus under full military occupation. The occupying soldiers were Northerners and Civil War veterans, mainly—which meant they were Republicans. They knew they had not been sent merely to keep order, but to watch over the presidential election. On October 19 The Nation expressed its fear that “the soldiers … who are now making arrests for ‘intimidation’ in South Carolina, and who are to preserve order at the polls on Election Day, are really an armed force in the service, and acting under the orders of, one of the parties to the political contest.

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