Author: nunleyta

If the election of 1876 were a sitcom, it would have all the tropes, at least, for an election. Voter fraud, disenfranchisement targeting people of color, shady behind-the-scene deals—you name it, the 1876 Election has got it. 

As votes from the 1876 Election were being counted up, Rutherford B. Hayes, the Republican candidate, called election fraud. Only, unlike some, he was right. Voting ballots had truly been manipulated, specifically targeting newly enfranchised Black voters into wrongly voting for their choice of candidate. Military groups intimidated voters at the polls and at home, using political violence to sway the election outcome to their side. It wasn’t until March of the next year that Hayes would finally be named the President—but only after he made a deal to end Reconstruction. 

We can draw parallels both to the past and the future for the 1876 Election. Just like in the 1824 Election, in that infamous “corrupt bargain” that allegedly gave John Adams the election and Henry Clay the position of Secretary of State, conversations to make Hayes president were going on behind closed doors. Hayes, though an abolitionist himself, became known as the president who failed Reconstruction in exchange for his own political position. 

The Election of 1876 also draws parallels to a more recent one, the 2000 Election. Both elections took months to resolve and required special intervention. In the case of 1876, it was creating the new Electoral Commission to settle the race. For 2000, the Election was thrown to the Supreme Court. Issues of voter fraud came up in both presidential races, too. 

From these parallels, we see that political bargaining, contestation, and voter fraud is nothing new to the United States. In 2020, former President Donald Trump tried to appeal to this cycle in history, saying voter fraud had lost him the election. There was no such proof of this statement. 

Yet, as these issues do not exist in a vacuum, they are, in fact, important to keep in the forefront of our minds. The projected gap between presidential candidates Kamala Harris and Donald Trump is projected to be narrow in the 2024 election. Maybe the cycle is set to run again this year. 

It’s the year 2000, and we’re knee deep in the new age of technology—instantaneous information, y2k fashion and campaign websites galore. The 2000 Presidential Election was one of the first to widely utilize the internet and digital tools in its campaigning. And the wider media was part of the problem that got us into this huge mess of Bush v. Gore and everything it entailed. 

On Nov. 7, Election Night across the U.S., newspapers all over the country were attempting to call the election early; headlines for tomorrow’s paper were due. We had never seen the amount of instant news like this in a contested election—it had arguably been over a century since the last contested election. In 2000, news channels were able to practically live update viewers with the results of the election due to exit polling. The only problem was that the exit polling wasn’t accurate. 

In the early hours of Nov. 8, the margin between Bush and Gore’s votes narrowed. The election came down to Florida as a battleground state. As votes trickled in, newsrooms started calling the race. Fox News was the first to go on air and call Florida a victory for Bush. John Ellis, George W. Bush’s first cousin and a reporter for Fox News, told the New Yorker shortly after Fox’s mistake, “Everyone followed us.”

Fox had just effectively misinformed a nation of Americans with that seemingly innocent early race call. Even Jeb Bush, who arguably had a horse in the race, had more journalistic integrity than Fox News and said the numbers were still too close to call. Yet, Fox News  had managed to dupe Gore himself.

Soon after the unofficial results were called, Gore phoned Bush, informally conceding the election to Bush in what—funnily enough—would not be for the last time. Ellis told the New Yorker that just an hour after Fox called Florida for Bush, the news channel’s vote counter went into reversal for a second time. 

Gore phoned Bush again that night, retracting his concession. What would follow after this election day was over a month of legal battle, while the election results remained contested. 

Without the media’s role in the race, the 2000 election would very likely still have been an unclear race after election day. But the media certainly helped sow confusion in their rush to the presses. Columnists and political leaders were quick to remind the public of this journalistic sin in the lead up to the 2020 election. 

Now, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are in an election projected to be possibly as close as the 2000 election—perhaps we should look to the 2000 election as a precedent. 

After President Lincoln’s 1860 election victory, the end of slavery lay in wait, a latent threat for the Democratic party. Most of the Republican party saw no need for an immediate end to slavery and instead advocated for a gradual change. Lincoln noted in a debate with Stephen Douglas that the end of slavery would take “a hundred years at the least.” Yet, Democrats continued to insist Republicans wanted to abolish slavery then and now. 

One-off incidents turned to scapegoats in support of Southern secession. The raid at Harpers Ferry, led by abolitionist John Brown, threatened a cycle of repeat uprisings for Southern Democrats. The success of the Wide Awakes, a grassroots political movement based in Democratic strongholds across Northern states, was bad enough; even worse was when Black men began marching with the group in their processions and “confirmed the southern narrative of the coming Republican apocalypse.”

Democratic papers used scare tactics in their reporting of these one-off events. When Black men started showing up to Republican rallies, the Quincy Herald turned to writing blatantly racist, galvanizing headlines—”Another N-word in the Crowd.” They also reported on the event “where a white and black man “join[ed] hands” while holding a U.S. flag.” 

For Southern Democrats, though they likely knew the threat of abolitionism was not immediate, the Republican party’s rise to power was domineering. No longer would they be able to continue their tarnished legacy for ages to come. An immediate, strong response was necessary. What better way to facilitate it than spreading exaggerated stories?

We still see scare tactics like these used by politicians today. Take the first presidential debate for example. Somewhere along the way, Donald Trump starts employing a rather familiar scare tactic to the 1860 idea that Republicans were staunch sympathizers to immigrants or enslaved people—so much so, that it would be at the expense of white Americans. 

In reference to Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, Trump insists that these immigrants are eating neighbors’ cats and dogs. The lurking message behind this obvious xenophobic quote is that Kamala Harris and the Democrat party are supporting these so-called violent, Haitian immigrants. 

Both Trump and the Democrats of the South in 1860 centralized white fears in their arguments by exaggerating and caricaturing their opponents’ policies. 

Sources: 

Jon Grinspan. “‘Young Men for War’: The Wide Awakes and Lincoln’s 1860 Presidential Campaign.” The Journal of American History 96, no. 2 (2009): 357–78. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25622297.

Sally Heinzel. “‘To Protect the Rights of the White Race:’ Illinois Republican Racial Politics in the 1860 Campaign and the Twenty-Second General Assembly.” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society (1998-) 108, no. 3–4 (2015): 374–406. https://doi.org/10.5406/jillistathistsoc.108.3-4.0374.

In the election of 1800, the Federalists were faced with a tough choice—whether to settle with Thomas Jefferson or Aaron Burr, both Democratic Republicans, as the man to run the country. 36 tie-breaking ballots in the House of Representatives proved this task was no small one. 

Amidst those 36 rounds of voting, men like Alexander Hamilton were writing letters to members of the House, urging them that in “In a choice of Evils, let them take the least”: Jefferson rather than Burr. Hamilton chose his recipients wisely. One such letter arrived to Harrison Gray Otis, Speaker of the Massachusetts House, addressed on Dec. 23, 1800—while the tie between Burr and Jefferson was still actively being contested. Hamilton’s purpose was not only to convince Gray Otis to change his vote to Jefferson, but also to hopefully convince Gray Otis so well that the Massachusetts congressman became a mouthpiece for the rest of the Federalists. Though Gray Otis never changed his own vote to Jefferson, the first contested election gives us a glimpse into political persuasions and inter-party relationships that still exist today. 

I’m reminded of the waves of calling for the end of Joe Biden’s presidential campaign this last summer. That political rhetoric—”choose the lesser of two evils”—is certainly something we’re familiar with in 2024. In 1800, the concern over Burr was that he could not be controlled. Hamilton tells Gray Otis in his letter, “Mr. Jefferson I suspect will not dare much. Mr. Burr will.” In 2024, Democrats worried Biden would practically throw the election to the Republicans due to a declining performance. 

Dozens of figures publicly called for Biden to step down this summer, with the most prominent, famous figure perhaps being George Clooney in his op-ed to the New York Times. It is heavily suspected that former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi also called for Biden to step down behind closed doors. Though both Pelosi and Clooney were a part of Biden’s own political party, I still believe we see connections between men like Hamilton’s attempted persuasion of Gray Otis and today’s political world. When faced with no other option but to choose a Democratic Republican, Hamilton set down to write letters to his fellow Federalists. In 2024, when faced with a candidate Democrats believed would fall short of the election, they turned to behind-closed-doors persuasions and open letters for all eyes to see. 

Sources:

Sloan, Herbert. “‘In a Choice of Evils… Jefferson Is in Every View Less Dangerous than Burr’: Alexander Hamilton to Harrison Gray Otis on the Deadlocked Presidential Election of 1800.” OAH Magazine of History 18, no. 5 (2004): 53–57. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25163723.

Alexander Hamilton’s Letter to Harrison Gray Otis from Dec. 23, 1800