The Great End of Reconstruction:Official Version

“Those who had committed violence during the election {of 1876} are christians, not thieves or cut throats.

-Rutherford B. Hayes

The violence the newly elected president was talking about was the violence committed by white democrats against black voters and any who had supported their candidates during the 1876 election.

I’m really not interested in whether or not the election was stolen. The outcome would have been the same.The three contested states of Florida, South Carolina and Louisiana. There was a fourth disputed state, which actually seldom gets mentioned and that was Oregon where the voters elected Hayes, but the democratic governor disqualified some of the republican electors and sent a democratic slate to congress.

Vice-president Henry Wilson had died and the electoral votes would be certified by the republican who was acting as the president of the senate, Thomas W. Ferry. But the democratic majority in the house objected and Ferry agreed to a compromise of each house five members to join a commission with five supreme court justices who would decide which slate of electors to count for the four states that had sent duplicate slates.

All in all seven republicans and seven democrats were selected to the commission. You may have heard of Gore v. Bush. Well that was not the first time the court had entered into the fray of a disputed election. Albeit, that the election was a primary in Texas between Coke Stevenson and Lyndon Johnson, but the decision determined the senator because no republican stood a chance, This time as the circuit judge presiding over Texas for the supremies was Hugo Black and he unilaterally overruled the Texas courts and declared Johnson the winner.

But in 1876 there was a “non-partisan” justice on the court, David Davis. Davis was a great choice if it was anyone’s guess which candidate of the two major candidates who had accumulated any electoral votes he would select. Davis apparently had no idea either and so he declined to be the deciding vote on the commission.

But it was not quite that simple as the Illinois legislature had thought to purchase his vote and selected him to be their next senate. I believe Davis himself saw through this ruse and immediately resigned from the court and took his seat in the senate. The next best thing seemed to replace Davis with Justice Joseph Bradley as perhaps the next most impartial justice on the court.

Bradley was still seen as something of an enigma let us say. He was not very fond of the civil rights amendments and would author the infamous Civil Rights Cases decision in 1883. On the other hand he was very liberal in interpreting the fourteenth amendment in regards to the commerce clause in the constitution and was the lead dissenter in the Slaughterhouse Cases which had already taken place and led both parties to believe he might support their candidate in 1876.

Well he was a “republican”; and a republican who had become exceedingly wealthy as a railroad lawyer. So what do you think? Oh you know the outcome of the election already don’t you?

It is generally written Tilden won the election outright with the largest majority in American history for any candidate who did not become president. Whoa?

Do I have to believe this is true? In South Carolina alone at least 150 black voters were murdered when they attempted to cast a ballot. For illiterate voters the ballots were printed with the donkey and elephant symbols and for white voters the candidates were rightly connected to the candidate with the symbol of his party. But in the three disputed states of the south, black men who could not read were given ballots with the donkey beside Hayes name and the elephant beside Tilden’s. I suppose white voters who might have been known to have republican leanings might have been given ballots with the transverse symbols.

The riots in Louisiana had been going on almost non-stop for several years and every election had been disputed. The state had declared two winners and only the Federal government enforced the republican officials while the democrats intimidated the government with violence and by declaring all of their official acts moot to the democratic (unelected govt.) and their own proclamations.

So I don’t think it is necessarily accurate to say Tilden was the popularly elected president. Without the fraud and violence of these christians as Hayes declared them to be.

And so when the commission gave the 20 disputed votes to Hayes, he won 185-184. But there’s another caveat to this election that is almost completely ignored. The democratic congress had just admitted a new democratic state to the union—they shouldn’t have been admitted because they didn’t have the requisite population. But there was precedent there—Lincoln admitted Nevada with an even smaller population in 1864. (State motto “battle born.)

There was a reverse precedent as well. New Mexico had the requisite population after they had been ceded to the U.S. at the conclusion of the war with Mexico. They weren’t accepted into the union until 1912—most of that population was Latino.

And so feeling assured of Colorado’s loyalty they became a state just three months before the election. But then Colorado did not hold an election in 1876 and the legislature simply designated three electors. (It was the last time in American history when a state did not hold any popular vote for president.)

Had Colorado fulfilled the democratic congress’ expectations, then no commission would have been necessary. Tilden would have had 187 electoral votes without any of the disputed slates necessary.

But what it all came down to was,it didn’t even matter who became president. By 1876 any dreams of freedom for black or working class voters in America was doomed no matter who had been elected to the presidency.

And then just a few months after taking office all hell broke loose and America called out its army against its citizens for the second time. The entire working class revolted. The army was necessary because local guards frequently supported the workers;in some instances local police forces joined with the workers. This was the real American civil war, not the war between the states and whether or not states could secede. However you may see that conflict, it was a conflict between two governments and most of the world viewed it from that perspective. It was just a very large rebellion over property rights over who would have control of the regional property.

England does not call the twenty-five year war from 1138-1153 a civil war, but the “great anarchy.”

A civil war is when the people revolt against the authorities. And that is what occurred in 1877. The government sided with its gilded kings against whom the people wished to overthrow.

It was a pretty short war. All of the money, all of the resources, all of the power, and all of the guns were held by the gilded hands that directed (and had put in place) President Rutherford B. Hayes.

This was when the American civil war occurred. The time when Americans rose up civilly against American oppression and were thrown back into their chains martially.

This was the year democracy’s epitaph was written in America and all the pretenses that its masters were all sailing on ships oared by its working class became exposed. And the only believers in democratic America from that day forward were the political hacks that pretended to be sincerely concerned about people’s welfare.

Oh, there were exceptions, I’m sure. But overall the clocks of democracy have not yet been wound to the future. It is still 1877 for the masters, and with nothing left to hope for, the defeated people of Americans did indeed vote against the democracy so many felt they had never been given. The vote was the only weapon given to them to overthrow the government. So all you vote loving dreamers, when people feel their vote is futile they will eventually find a way to vote against the vote.

Remember, o ye, the words of James Madison. There can be no greater tyranny than the tyranny of the majority. Especially when the majority is monopolized by the minority of money.

And now we will all be crucified upside down until we develop the strength to right the bitter end of reconstruction’s demise.