WHEN DEMOCRATS TRIED TO STEAL AN ELECTION BY THUGGERY
Henry Watterson, publisher of the Louisville Courier-Journal and a
DEMOCRAT congressman from Kentucky, on January 8, 1876—which he called “St. Jackson’s Day” because it marked the Battle of New Orleans—called for “the presence of at least 10,000 unarmed Kentuckians in the city” to march on Washington to ensure Samuel Tilden was elected.
His friend Joseph Pulitzer, still building a vast newspaper empire, went further, calling for 100,000 people “fully armed and ready for business” to ensure that Tilden became president.
Angry
DEMOCRAT mobs across the country would chant, “Tilden or blood,” and reportedly in a dozen states, club-wielding “Tilden Minutemen” had formed threatening to march into Washington to take the White House for their candidate. This came to Tilden’s chagrin, who sought to calm the rowdiness, as he didn’t want to be responsible for an insurrection.
Still, with all the bellicose verbiage from the newspapers and the masses, it was the
DEMOCRAT hierarchy in the South that was ready to make a deal, though not the Northern
DEMOCRATS.
Richard Smith of the Republican Cincinnati Gazette reached out to
DEMOCRAT power-brokers.
Rutherford Hayes asserted to Smith in early January 1877: “I am not a believer in the trustworthiness of the forces you hope to rally.” But, he told the newspaperman, he did back internal improvements and education funding in the South believing it would “divide the whites” and help “obliterate the color line.”
On the night of February 26, 1877, four
DEMOCRATS —Representatives John Y. Brown and Watterson of Kentucky, Senator J.B. Gordon of Georgia and Representative W. M. Levy of Louisiana—met with Ohio Republicans James Garfield and Charles Foster, both House members, and Ohio Senator Stanley Matthews and Ohio Senator-elect John Sherman at the Wormley House hotel in Washington to see if a deal could be reached to prevent the House
DEMOCRATS from blocking the results with a filibuster.
The men talked about details through the night, and by morning agreed to stop the House
DEMOCRAT delay tactics that were blocking the certification of the Electoral Commission’s findings, on the condition of ending Reconstruction, appointing a
DEMOCRAT to the Cabinet, and providing federal money for Southern projects. These were things Hayes expected to do anyway.
http://www.newsweek.com/top-five-rigged-us-presidential-elections-511765