Samuel Tilden was a wealthy, conservative railroad lawyer, a hard money man who earned his reformist credentials fighting against Tammany Hall by trying institute a property requirement for New York's elections. It is not the resume of a man who's inclined to break-bread with labor or someone to 'screw' the gilded age.
The entire scenario rests upon the, quite frankly fanciful, idea that the mercurial Tilden, who was nominally running on sectional reconciliation and civil service reform, and the blustering, indecisive McClellan, would the verve to raise an paramilitary army to march on Washington while U.S. Grant was in the White House and still nominal commander in chief. I don't think Tilden and Little Mac had the drive to dit and I don't think there would've been much support for it, the murmurings of a handful of Democrats and ex-Confederates aside.
To back a rebellion against a lawfully (if dubiously) elected President, would be the one thing that might've inflamed Northern opinion enough to reverse the death rattle reconstruction had been trapped in since the panic of 1873. It's why I don't think the South backs Tilden, and without the South, I doubt there's much organic support for a Tilden rebellion. Tammany hates his guts, his hard money stance puts him staunchly at odds with the soft-money forces in the Democratic Party, and Bourbon Democrats are a lot of things, but as the foot soldiers of a Tildenite rebellion? Color me doubtful.
To get to this sort of situation I would envision avoiding Hayes getting lawfully elected at all.
The article I linked above mentions that Tilden was very much opposed to the House Democrats acceding to the Electoral Commission - that may be a way to start.
I think you do have a point that a lot of the stuff mentioned in the article was mere fighting words. But McClellan did construct a paramilitary organization in this period and the New York state government was readied to make him lead its state militia, and though many Democrats were hardly enthused about Tilden, they were behind him. This excerpt is revealing:
Although he did not intend to launch a first strike, privately Tilden began to prepare two intertwined cases that would box Republicans into a corner. First he defended the House's right to name him president, a necessary prelude to any claim he could make on the office. Next he asserted a state's right to forcefully resist a usurper's inauguration. While Congress would elude Tilden's control, he had better luck close to home. New York governor Lucius Robinson's January inaugural included a Tilden‐drafted section promising state resistance to the “revolutionary” overthrow of “the time‐consecrated methods of constitutional government.”57
The fractured vision of dual presidents and dual capitals also produced, in both imagination and reality, a counter‐military led by George B. McClellan.58 The leading Union general for much of the first two years of the Civil War, and an 1864 presidential candidate who lost to Lincoln, McClellan campaigned for his longtime ally Tilden across the Northeast and Midwest in 1876, urging his “fellow‐citizens and fellow‐soldiers” to resist any Republican effort to block Tilden's inauguration.59Privately he warned his mother that any effort to deny Tilden the office “must be forcible + revolutionary + must be met by force.”60Although fighting words are common, McClellan's history raises interesting questions about the boundaries between politics and the military. Fifteen years earlier, during the Civil War, many people had called on McClellan, in his telling, to “save the nation, alluding to the presidency, dictatorship, etc.” But for his love for his wife, he wrote, he might “cheerfully take the dictatorship and agree to lay down my life when the country is saved.”61 After the 1876 election, Tilden asked Governor Robinson to name McClellan the state adjutant general “in view of possible contingencies.” Following Robinson from Tilden's mansion, Bigelow urged the governor to wait, as McClellan's command of the state militia “would be a red rag to Republicans.” But Bigelow's response was strategic. Rather than denying McClellan, he convinced the governor to “reserve” the selection until it would have more impact. Bigelow's response to the event is telling. “The fact that we have to contemplate such emergencies, is a melancholy commentary upon the anniversary we have been celebrating,” he wrote. “The chances are by no means inconsiderable that our form of govt. may not survive another 4 of July without serious modifications, the results of a perhaps bloody strife.”62
As institutional processes for resolving politics broke down, new openings emerged for counter‐mobilization. McClellan began to construct what appears to have been a paramilitary organization. Because he did not save his outgoing correspondence during this period, his actions must be deciphered by reading between the lines of his incoming letters. Some are evocative but not reliable, full of vague bragging that “a little bit of war to inaugurate Mr. Tilden would do us no harm … speak the word, and you will have a hundred thousand ‘boys in blue’ and in everything else, armed, at Washington by Sunday.”63 Far‐flung soldiers promised that they were willing to “fight and die” under McClellan's banner.64More revealing, however, are letters from men working with him to organize such a resistance, including former Confederate general Dabney Maury, one of McClellan's West Point instructors. Maury urged McClellan to produce “a pose of moral and physical power too great to dare,” discussed strategic allocations of divisions, brigades, and regiments, and warned McClellan to hold units in reserve for later combat.65 In Massachusetts, former Union brigadier general John M. Tobin gathered an estimated 5,000 veterans into a Conservative Soldiers and Sailors Association. Tobin made tantalizing references to unnamed “potent considerations set forth” in a lost letter from McClellan. “The few who have seen it open their eyes wide, and it nerves them on … Any movement to which you may lend your name … would be the signal for arousing en masse here all the conservative soldiers and sailors.”66Although these letters give shape to rumors of paramilitary mobilization across the country, McClellan's intent is impossible to define precisely.
His New York office complained of a shortage of funds, a constant problem for people who worked with the legendarily cheap (and personally wealthy) Tilden. “As far as I can see I am personally stuck for the office room,” the general in charge of the New York office wrote. “To do a thing of this kind without money is quite absurd.”67
For U.S. historians, the story of a Tilden‐McClellan paramilitary organization demonstrates that stabilization was contingent upon the candidates' behavior. Here Tilden's aggressive actions conflict with contemporary and historical portrayals of his caution. Had Tilden claimed the position immediately, “his election would have been a matter of course,” Bigelow wrote. “But it was impossible. A man who must have a man rub him every morning & evening for an hour or so, who must take a clyster every morning to get a passage … how could such a man be expected to [demand the presidency] and wind up perhaps at the last in a prison?” Hyperbolic Democratic editor Henry Watterson said that he had been willing to “provide the physical means” of “seating [Tilden] in office,” but Tilden was hamstrung by his “confidence in the powers and forms of law.”68 The candidate's public silence frustrated financier August Belmont, who urged “radical boldness and recklessness” and “a revolutionary … fight.” With a careful eye to sequence, it is possible to reconcile the evidence for both Tilden's caution and his boldness. Tilden's reticence was calculated to increase pressure at a different moment, after the Democratic House of Representatives named him president.69 By refusing to threaten civil war in December, he was increasing the possibility that it might eventually come later, once two presidents had title. When Democratic congressmen threatened to derail his plan by considering a compromise, his passivity evaporated. “No need of hot haste but much danger in it,” he wrote in a midnight draft memo. The Republicans had “no way out but by usurpation.”70 Tilden lobbied congressional Democrats to simply count him the winner. When Democratic chairman Abram Hewitt told Tilden that House Democrats in fact planned to accede to an electoral commission to resolve the dispute, Tilden asked incredulously, “Why surrender now? Why surrender before the battle, for fear you may have to surrender after the battle is over?”71
The article does get into as you say Tilden’s cautions, noted by his contemporaries. But if the crisis is not resolved by inauguration day, I do think there would be dual inaugurations. New York’s state government would be fully behind Tilden, and McClellan would lead its state militia along with paramilitaries across the nation. It would be a truly national affair in at least that way.
Granted, when I sketched this scenario myself after reading this (very fascinating) article, I also concluded the Democrats did not have the guts for a full-blown civil war, with my conclusion being that, especially with a much worse version of the Strike of 1877 happening at the same time, there’d be a dual resignation and a compromise candidate selected (perhaps David Davis). With a very chaotic 1877-1880 period following this and the 1880 election being a Grant vs. McClellan fight (with a stronger Greenback Party bolstered by the strikes).
