As we closely watch the states of Florida, Georgia and Arizona to see if every vote is fairly counted, I am still mining Ron Chernow’s 1000 page biography of Ulysses S Grant for insight into our time. I’ve written a couple of times about how we’ve never been more divided—here’s another example of that, a time when both political parties claimed to have won the states of Florida, Louisiana and South Carolina and how the president crafted a compromise to settle the dispute.
In 1876 the election to choose Grant’s successor was the first election post Civil War where the US Army wasn’t guaranteeing the safety of recently freed men to vote in the south. The southern governors, who were still by and large Republicans elected with strong black participation, begged for military help in the elections but by then there was a law that required the governors to prove that there was no other option first. By the time some of the governors were able to prove it, much violence and intimidation of black voters had taken place. Intimidation, threats and outright mob killings and dismemberment (leaving black men’s bodies rotting the public square was a common campaign “tactic”).
At the end of the election, both the Democratic and the Republican parties claimed to have won control of the legislatures of Louisiana, South Carolina and Florida. These “dual” legislatures each cast their electoral votes (remember that the allocation of electoral votes were decided by the legislatures not the voters directly in those days) for their respective candidates: Democrats chose their nominee Samuel J. Tilden, Republicans chose their nominee Rutherford B. Hayes. The election was so close that the electoral votes of these three states would be enough to swing the presidential election one way or the other. It was left to President Grant in the waning days of his presidency to create a solution to this problem that appeared fair enough to not spark another civil war.
To solve it, Grant asked the Congress to send him a bill creating a bipartisan commission composed of seven august well-respected members, albeit four Republican and three Democratic, to decide the outcome of the presidential election. In what became known as “the compromise of 1877,” the commission chose Hayes with a trade-off that effectively spelled the end of Reconstruction and set the terms to allow disenfranchisement of black voters in the south for roughly another 100 years.
At the end of his life, Grant counted this moment as his biggest failure as president. He considered that the short-term retention of the presidency for Republicans in no way off-set what he saw as a restoration of a shadow version of slavery: permanent legalized segregation and disenfranchisement. For him, this meant that the millions of soldiers he personally put in harms way as the commander of the Union Army, had died in vain.
All of this history of course simply underscores the importance of free and fair elections in our time. As the New York Times reported yesterday about Andrew Gillum, the Democratic candidate for Governor in Florida whose race is currently under recount, “’Voter disenfranchisement doesn’t just show up when you put dogs on people or water hoses, or block entrances, that’s not the only form of voter disenfranchise-ment,’” Mr. Gillum said at St. John [Missionary Baptist Church], citing reports that some voters were turned away from polling sites because of discrepancies with their signatures on identification cards.” The same article went on to say:
Mr. Gillum has raised his own claims of voting disparities. He cited a report that a handful of voters in Bay County, a predominantly white Gulf Coast area ravaged by Hurricane Michael last month, were allowed to cast votes by email or fax while voters in more diverse counties on Florida’s densely populated East coast were screened more rigorously.
“In Bay County they were accepting votes by email,” he told his audience in Boynton Beach — 12 miles south of the president’s golf resort and Winter White House, Mar-a-Lago. “That was a deeply red county, a county I competed for even though I knew it was a deeply Republican area. But they want to question a man or a woman around here who stood 30 or 45 minutes or an hour in line?”
Let us pray and know that we learn from and improve on our past history and let the election results accurately reflect every vote cast.