alternatehistory.com

Though he was an antislavery man who welcomed the founding of the Republican Party, James Russell Lowell was not altogether happy about the direction the party was taking after the Civil War. He was dismayed by the corruption in the Grant administration. In 1876, he helped block a Blaine nomination at the Republican national convention and later declined Republican requests that he run for Congress, though he was told that he was the only Republican who might carry his district. He did however reluctantly agree to serve as a Hayes elector from Massachusetts. He would later be appointed by Republican presidents to diplomatic posts in Spain and Great Britain; in 1884, he stated in a letter that if he had been in the US, he would definitely have voted for Cleveland. So clearly his loyalty to the Republican Party had *some* limits.

Anyway, to get back to 1876: Some Democrats urged Lowell to vote for Tilden, because, they said, the evidence clearly showed Tilden had won. Lowell's vote would, of course, have been enough to elect Tilden. Lowell declined to do so. A biographer of Lowell later wrote,

"It was a curious comment on affairs. It implied on the part of those who proposed it a confidence that Lowell was independent enough to use this right. I am not sure that any other elector was named who might be expected to take this responsibility. On the other hand, those who urged this course seem to have been blind to the enormous violation of faith involved in such a course. The machinery of the electoral system, however it had been designed at first, had gradually and immutably become a mere device for the registry of the popular choice; all initiative on the part of the electors was totally cancelled. Lowell himself never had any hesitation. As he wrote to Mr. Leslie Stephen: 'In my own judgment I have no choice, and am bound in honor to vote for Hayes, as the people who chose me expected me to do. They did not choose me because they had confidence in my judgment, but because they thought they knew what that judgment would be. If I had told them that I should vote for Tilden, they would never have nominated me. It is a plain question of trust. The provoking part of it is that I tried to escape nomination all I could, and only did not decline because I thought it would be making too much fuss over a trifle.'" http://books.google.com/books?id=XOsOAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA216

Let us nevertheless suppose--however unlikely this may be [1]--that Lowell did indeed vote for Tilden, believing that saving the country from a (supposedly) fraudulently elected president outweighed his commitment to the people of Massachusetts to vote for Hayes. I am not interested here in the effects of a Tilden presidency (this has been discussed on several occasions in soc.history.what-if, e.g., https://groups.google.com/d/msg/soc.history.what-if/-OrKMv-AAeE/UtolTH8I0fcJ) but specifically in the effects of Tilden winning *through a faithless elector.* Does this finally bring about Electoral College reform, at least to the extent of an anti-"faithless elector" constitutional amendment? (An obvious problem is that the Democrats will see such an amendment as a slap in the face for Tilden--yet they might fear that a Democratic elector would some day do what this alt-Lowell did, in reverse...)

[1] During the campaign Lowell acknowledged that both parties had nominated men of character for president, and that both claimed to be committed to civil service reform and a sound currency. Still, he felt that on the whole the Republicans were more to be trusted than the Democrats, and in particular he was bothered by what he conidered Tilden's extreme states' rights views.
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