One thing that is often overlooked in discussions of the 1876 presidential election is whether the Democrats might have found a stronger candidate than Tilden. Tilden may have been a good candidate for the Northeast, but had his problems west of the Alleghenies. He lost Ohio and the two West Coast states (California and Oregon) and while he did narrowly carry Indiana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_1876
it was with the help of (1) a Hoosier running mate (Thomas Hendricks) and (2) Peter Cooper's third-party Greenback ("rag baby") candidacy. Republicans believed that--in Indiana at least--Cooper took most of his votes from traditionally Republican farmers who were bothered by hard times but would never vote Democratic because they associated the Democrats with disloyalty during the Civil War. According to Michael F. Holt's *By One Vote: The Disputed Presidential Election of 1876* Indiana may have been the one state where Cooper made a difference in the electoral vote. (Note that if Hayes had carried Indiana, he could have lost two of the three disputed southern states, Louisiana and Florida, and still won the White House by carrying South Carolina alone--and South Carolina of all the three disputed southern states was the one where the Democrats' case was weakest. In fact, the Democrats in OTL didn't even demand that South Carolina's electoral votes be counted for Tilden, simply that they be thrown out because of the failure of the Republican South Carolina legislature to implement a provision of the 1868 state constitution calling on it to enact a voter registration law.)
John D. Defrees, who had been the leading Whig and then Republican editor in Indiana, and had backed the Liberal Republicans in 1872, wrote a letter to the *Indianapolis News* announcing his support for Hayes. He gave as his main reason that the federal government would not be safe in the hands of those "who attempted its destruction" but he also directed a specific attack on Tilden which was designed to turn hard-handed, anti-railroad farmers against him: "The St. Louis convention selected a very nice, prim, little, withered-up, fidgety old bachelor, about one-hundred and twenty-pounds avoirdupois, who never had a genuine impulse for man nor any affection for woman, the very prince of 'Wall Street speculators and coupon clippers' as atrue representative of the Democratic party!" (Holt, p. 129) Not a candidate for real men, was the obvious message...
True, the alternatives to Tilden had their own problems. Hendricks' reputation as an inflationist might have helped him in the Northwest, but would greatly hurt the Democrats in trying to win eastern and especially Liberal Republican support. Thomas F. Bayard of Delaware was a favorite of southerners--but even they realized that precisely for that reason he would be poison in the North. Winfield Scott Hancock of Pennsylvania (who would be the Democrats' 1880 nominee) was another possibility, but most northeastern Democrats in 1876 thought the Pennsylvania Democracy was unsound on the money question.
Is there any other Democratic candidate who could have support in both East and West? (Any candidate who could win in November and would withdraw troops from the South was fine with southern Democrats, for whom the money question was secondary.) I would suggest Ohio's Senator Allen G. Thurman (later to be Grover Cleveland's running mate in 1888). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_G._Thurman Thurman was the ablest Democrat in Ohio, and one of the ablest in the nation. It is true that he was very narrowly (by about 3,000 votes) defeated by Rutherford Hayes for governor in 1867. But he had gone on to a distinguished career in the US Senate. He had been the leading Democratic spokesman in the Senate against John Sherman's Specie Resumption Act of 1875 (which called for the resumption of specie payments by 1879). He opposed it, not in crude inflationist terms, but by arguing that it would simply not work. (The technical arguments would take up a post in itself but suffice it to say that, as Sherman conceded, the withdrawal of greenbacks under the bill depended on the initiative of national bankers requesting new banknotes from the Comptroller of the Currency. Thurman and other Democrats retorted that with business paralyzed by the depression, bankers lacked customers for notes and would hence not seek additional national banknotes. And until those notes were issued by the Treasury, no greenbacks would be withdrawn from circulation. As Thurman argued, "You will have no increased banking under this bill until business begins to revive." In short, as Holt summarizes it, "far from promoting economic recovery, the success of the Specie Resumption Act depended on such a recovery." Holt, *By One Vote*, p. 24.)
So why did Thurman get very few votes at the St. Louis convention? The main reason was his lack of support from his own state. Here Thurman's uncle, William Allen, played the key role. Allen, who had been Senator from Ohio from 1837 to 1849, had once been a hard-money Jacksonian, but "had morphed by the 1870s into a fan of greenbacks and a ferocious foe of currency contraction and national banks." (Holt, p. 55) Allen had come out of retirement in 1873, and had narrowly been elected governor of Ohio, taking office at the age of 70. In 1875, he narrowly lost to Hayes (who had thus defeated Ohio's two most prominent Democrats, Thurman and Allen, and instantly became mentioned as a possible presidential nominee for 1876.) Hayes' victory in 1875 is often seen as a victory for hard money over the greenbacks, but actually if that had been the sole issue, Allen would very likely have won. What killed Allen was anti-Catholicism. (A Cincinnati Democratic state legislator named John Geghan had introduced a resolution, which passed on a party-line vote, stating that freedom of conscience required that Catholic priests have access to prisons, reform schools, orphanages, state asylums, and other state institutions to minister to the needs of their Catholic inmates. In a public letter to a Catholic constituent, Geghan portrayed the bill as a debt owed by the Democratic Party to its Catholic supporters. Pouring gasoline on the flames, the Cincinnati *Catholic Telegraph* said that the Democrats could not win elections without Catholic support, and that if Democrats did not pass the bill, Catholic voters would withdraw this support. This enabled the Republicans to portray the Democrats as tools of the Catholic Church and to warn that if the Democrats would win, a division of the school funds would come next--even though the Ohio Constitution explicitly prohibited any such division!)
Unfortunately for Thurman, Allen, after his defeat, refused to retire from politics, and in a convention at Cincinnati in May 1876, Ohio Democrats by a vote of 366 to 308 supported Allen as the state's "favorite son" nominee and adopted a strong greenback platform. This killed Thurman's prospectsfor the presidential nomination in 1876. He did get a few votes in St. Louis, but the prevailing view was that he could not be taken seriously as a candidate because he had been repudiated by his own state's Democracy. Eastern Democrats were stunned by the way Ohio's Democrats had (in the easterners' opinion) committed suicide. The headline of a Baltimore Democratic newspaper sufficiently revealed their view (Holt, p. 103):
"Ohio's Rag-Baby Madmen; Bill Allen for the Presidency; Inflation in Its Worst Form; The Idiotic Platform of a Lot of Lunatics; Senator Thurman Slaughtered."
Ohio Republicans could hardly believe their good luck: "Judge T. [Thurman] is decidedly the ablest and best man of his party in Ohio, and has rendered it the most service", Governor Hayes wrote to a correspondent. "Yet the 'howling idiots' (Democratic managers) put Allen over him!" "Our Democratic friends have blundered as usual", he informed Alphonzo Taft a couple of days later. "We can count in confidence on their doing it at the smallest opportunity." "Ohio has killed Thurman & done Allen no good" among Kentucky's Democrats, wrote former Congressman James Beck. The result was simply to drive Kentucky, which might have supported Thurman, into the Tilden camp.
Given that Allen's victory in Cincinnati wasn't all that overwhelming, I don't think it is inconceivable that Thurman could have won his state's party's support. In any event, if nothing else, we could have as our POD that Allen dies in early 1876 or at least announces that at the age of 72 he is retiring from politics once and for all. (He should have realized not only that he and his platform had no chance of winning the support of Democrats in any eastern state except perhaps Pennsylvania, but that even if the Democrats were in the mood to nominate an inflationist in St. Louis they would choose Hendricks instead.) Some of his Ohio supporters might then support Hendricks, but enough would probably support their fellow-Ohioan Thurman (who after all had subjected the Specie Resumption Act to withering criticism) to enable him to win majority support as the state's favorite-son candidate. He would then be a plausible candidate for those looking for someone as an alternative to hard-money (Tilden) and soft-money (Hendricks) extremes. And one should remember that Tilden's support in his own state's Democracy was not solid; Tammany and its leader "Honest John" Kelly being quite critical.
If Thurman is nominated, can he defeat Hayes? Given that Tilden almost carried Ohio, I think that Thurman could carry it--so the big question becomes whether Thurman could carry New York. I feel that he could, because I think that Tilden's ultraconservatve image was by no means an unmixed electoral blessing even in the Northeast. Even Horatio Seymour, from the same political tradition as Tilden, warned him on October 25 that he was going to lose the votes of suffering Irish Catholic laborers because "The word 'reform' is not popular with working men. To them it means less money spent and less work." (Holt, p. 138) To be sure, someone with an image as a wild inflationist from out of the West would have a hard time among more prosperous voters in the Northeast, but Thurman could be sold to them as a thoughtful, moderate man. (I'm not sure who Thurman's running mate would be--Hendricks was an obvious if controversial "ticket balancer" with Tilden, but Hendricks and Thurman lived in adjacent states, and if in OTL some hard-money Liberals supported Hayes because they were worried about Hendricks on a Tilden-led ticket, they might be even more concerned about him on a Thurman-led ticket.)
Of course it's not clear just what difference Thurman in the White House would make. The remaining federal troops are of course withdrawn from the South--but that happened under Hayes anyway in OTL. Because of Republican control of the Senate, he could not get the Specie Resumption Act repealed even if he wanted to; and since he was not by any means opposed to specie resumption per se, he would presumably accomplish it in 1879 just as Hayes did in OTL. He might not have vetoed the Bland-Allison Act, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bland-Allison_Act but that would make little difference because Hayes' veto in OTL was overridden anyway.
He would no doubt try to take credit for the upturn in business conditions after 1876, and might have a good chance of being re-elected if he were to run in 1880 (both Hayes and Tilden had pledged themselves to serve only one term, and Tilden had even advocated a single-term-only constitutional amendment; I am not sure that Thurman would make such a pledge or favor such an amendment).
it was with the help of (1) a Hoosier running mate (Thomas Hendricks) and (2) Peter Cooper's third-party Greenback ("rag baby") candidacy. Republicans believed that--in Indiana at least--Cooper took most of his votes from traditionally Republican farmers who were bothered by hard times but would never vote Democratic because they associated the Democrats with disloyalty during the Civil War. According to Michael F. Holt's *By One Vote: The Disputed Presidential Election of 1876* Indiana may have been the one state where Cooper made a difference in the electoral vote. (Note that if Hayes had carried Indiana, he could have lost two of the three disputed southern states, Louisiana and Florida, and still won the White House by carrying South Carolina alone--and South Carolina of all the three disputed southern states was the one where the Democrats' case was weakest. In fact, the Democrats in OTL didn't even demand that South Carolina's electoral votes be counted for Tilden, simply that they be thrown out because of the failure of the Republican South Carolina legislature to implement a provision of the 1868 state constitution calling on it to enact a voter registration law.)
John D. Defrees, who had been the leading Whig and then Republican editor in Indiana, and had backed the Liberal Republicans in 1872, wrote a letter to the *Indianapolis News* announcing his support for Hayes. He gave as his main reason that the federal government would not be safe in the hands of those "who attempted its destruction" but he also directed a specific attack on Tilden which was designed to turn hard-handed, anti-railroad farmers against him: "The St. Louis convention selected a very nice, prim, little, withered-up, fidgety old bachelor, about one-hundred and twenty-pounds avoirdupois, who never had a genuine impulse for man nor any affection for woman, the very prince of 'Wall Street speculators and coupon clippers' as atrue representative of the Democratic party!" (Holt, p. 129) Not a candidate for real men, was the obvious message...
True, the alternatives to Tilden had their own problems. Hendricks' reputation as an inflationist might have helped him in the Northwest, but would greatly hurt the Democrats in trying to win eastern and especially Liberal Republican support. Thomas F. Bayard of Delaware was a favorite of southerners--but even they realized that precisely for that reason he would be poison in the North. Winfield Scott Hancock of Pennsylvania (who would be the Democrats' 1880 nominee) was another possibility, but most northeastern Democrats in 1876 thought the Pennsylvania Democracy was unsound on the money question.
Is there any other Democratic candidate who could have support in both East and West? (Any candidate who could win in November and would withdraw troops from the South was fine with southern Democrats, for whom the money question was secondary.) I would suggest Ohio's Senator Allen G. Thurman (later to be Grover Cleveland's running mate in 1888). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_G._Thurman Thurman was the ablest Democrat in Ohio, and one of the ablest in the nation. It is true that he was very narrowly (by about 3,000 votes) defeated by Rutherford Hayes for governor in 1867. But he had gone on to a distinguished career in the US Senate. He had been the leading Democratic spokesman in the Senate against John Sherman's Specie Resumption Act of 1875 (which called for the resumption of specie payments by 1879). He opposed it, not in crude inflationist terms, but by arguing that it would simply not work. (The technical arguments would take up a post in itself but suffice it to say that, as Sherman conceded, the withdrawal of greenbacks under the bill depended on the initiative of national bankers requesting new banknotes from the Comptroller of the Currency. Thurman and other Democrats retorted that with business paralyzed by the depression, bankers lacked customers for notes and would hence not seek additional national banknotes. And until those notes were issued by the Treasury, no greenbacks would be withdrawn from circulation. As Thurman argued, "You will have no increased banking under this bill until business begins to revive." In short, as Holt summarizes it, "far from promoting economic recovery, the success of the Specie Resumption Act depended on such a recovery." Holt, *By One Vote*, p. 24.)
So why did Thurman get very few votes at the St. Louis convention? The main reason was his lack of support from his own state. Here Thurman's uncle, William Allen, played the key role. Allen, who had been Senator from Ohio from 1837 to 1849, had once been a hard-money Jacksonian, but "had morphed by the 1870s into a fan of greenbacks and a ferocious foe of currency contraction and national banks." (Holt, p. 55) Allen had come out of retirement in 1873, and had narrowly been elected governor of Ohio, taking office at the age of 70. In 1875, he narrowly lost to Hayes (who had thus defeated Ohio's two most prominent Democrats, Thurman and Allen, and instantly became mentioned as a possible presidential nominee for 1876.) Hayes' victory in 1875 is often seen as a victory for hard money over the greenbacks, but actually if that had been the sole issue, Allen would very likely have won. What killed Allen was anti-Catholicism. (A Cincinnati Democratic state legislator named John Geghan had introduced a resolution, which passed on a party-line vote, stating that freedom of conscience required that Catholic priests have access to prisons, reform schools, orphanages, state asylums, and other state institutions to minister to the needs of their Catholic inmates. In a public letter to a Catholic constituent, Geghan portrayed the bill as a debt owed by the Democratic Party to its Catholic supporters. Pouring gasoline on the flames, the Cincinnati *Catholic Telegraph* said that the Democrats could not win elections without Catholic support, and that if Democrats did not pass the bill, Catholic voters would withdraw this support. This enabled the Republicans to portray the Democrats as tools of the Catholic Church and to warn that if the Democrats would win, a division of the school funds would come next--even though the Ohio Constitution explicitly prohibited any such division!)
Unfortunately for Thurman, Allen, after his defeat, refused to retire from politics, and in a convention at Cincinnati in May 1876, Ohio Democrats by a vote of 366 to 308 supported Allen as the state's "favorite son" nominee and adopted a strong greenback platform. This killed Thurman's prospectsfor the presidential nomination in 1876. He did get a few votes in St. Louis, but the prevailing view was that he could not be taken seriously as a candidate because he had been repudiated by his own state's Democracy. Eastern Democrats were stunned by the way Ohio's Democrats had (in the easterners' opinion) committed suicide. The headline of a Baltimore Democratic newspaper sufficiently revealed their view (Holt, p. 103):
"Ohio's Rag-Baby Madmen; Bill Allen for the Presidency; Inflation in Its Worst Form; The Idiotic Platform of a Lot of Lunatics; Senator Thurman Slaughtered."
Ohio Republicans could hardly believe their good luck: "Judge T. [Thurman] is decidedly the ablest and best man of his party in Ohio, and has rendered it the most service", Governor Hayes wrote to a correspondent. "Yet the 'howling idiots' (Democratic managers) put Allen over him!" "Our Democratic friends have blundered as usual", he informed Alphonzo Taft a couple of days later. "We can count in confidence on their doing it at the smallest opportunity." "Ohio has killed Thurman & done Allen no good" among Kentucky's Democrats, wrote former Congressman James Beck. The result was simply to drive Kentucky, which might have supported Thurman, into the Tilden camp.
Given that Allen's victory in Cincinnati wasn't all that overwhelming, I don't think it is inconceivable that Thurman could have won his state's party's support. In any event, if nothing else, we could have as our POD that Allen dies in early 1876 or at least announces that at the age of 72 he is retiring from politics once and for all. (He should have realized not only that he and his platform had no chance of winning the support of Democrats in any eastern state except perhaps Pennsylvania, but that even if the Democrats were in the mood to nominate an inflationist in St. Louis they would choose Hendricks instead.) Some of his Ohio supporters might then support Hendricks, but enough would probably support their fellow-Ohioan Thurman (who after all had subjected the Specie Resumption Act to withering criticism) to enable him to win majority support as the state's favorite-son candidate. He would then be a plausible candidate for those looking for someone as an alternative to hard-money (Tilden) and soft-money (Hendricks) extremes. And one should remember that Tilden's support in his own state's Democracy was not solid; Tammany and its leader "Honest John" Kelly being quite critical.
If Thurman is nominated, can he defeat Hayes? Given that Tilden almost carried Ohio, I think that Thurman could carry it--so the big question becomes whether Thurman could carry New York. I feel that he could, because I think that Tilden's ultraconservatve image was by no means an unmixed electoral blessing even in the Northeast. Even Horatio Seymour, from the same political tradition as Tilden, warned him on October 25 that he was going to lose the votes of suffering Irish Catholic laborers because "The word 'reform' is not popular with working men. To them it means less money spent and less work." (Holt, p. 138) To be sure, someone with an image as a wild inflationist from out of the West would have a hard time among more prosperous voters in the Northeast, but Thurman could be sold to them as a thoughtful, moderate man. (I'm not sure who Thurman's running mate would be--Hendricks was an obvious if controversial "ticket balancer" with Tilden, but Hendricks and Thurman lived in adjacent states, and if in OTL some hard-money Liberals supported Hayes because they were worried about Hendricks on a Tilden-led ticket, they might be even more concerned about him on a Thurman-led ticket.)
Of course it's not clear just what difference Thurman in the White House would make. The remaining federal troops are of course withdrawn from the South--but that happened under Hayes anyway in OTL. Because of Republican control of the Senate, he could not get the Specie Resumption Act repealed even if he wanted to; and since he was not by any means opposed to specie resumption per se, he would presumably accomplish it in 1879 just as Hayes did in OTL. He might not have vetoed the Bland-Allison Act, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bland-Allison_Act but that would make little difference because Hayes' veto in OTL was overridden anyway.
He would no doubt try to take credit for the upturn in business conditions after 1876, and might have a good chance of being re-elected if he were to run in 1880 (both Hayes and Tilden had pledged themselves to serve only one term, and Tilden had even advocated a single-term-only constitutional amendment; I am not sure that Thurman would make such a pledge or favor such an amendment).
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