The Stolen Election (July/august 1990 | Volume: 41, Issue: 5)

The Stolen Election

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Authors: Bernard A. Weisberger

Historic Era: Era 5: Civil War and Reconstruction (1850-1877)

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July/august 1990 | Volume 41, Issue 5

Last February, the White House was jubilant over the outcome of the election held in Nicaragua, where voters turned out the governing Sandinista National Liberation Front, which has run the country since 1979, as well as its president, Daniel Ortega. The new president is Violeta Chamorro, the candidate of the National Opposition Union (UNO), a coalition of anti-Sandinista parties backed by Washington as part of its long war against what the Bush and Reagan administrations styled a Marxist-Leninist dictatorship. In the days just after the results were published, however, conservative commentators expressed anxiety over whether or not there could be an orderly transfer of power.

In fact, such a peaceful transfer is rare. This country ought to know; we almost failed at it 113 years ago. And whereas in Nicaragua, in 1990, there was no doubt about the legitimate winner of the election, it was not certain who was going to become President of the United States on March 4, 1877, until 4:00 A.M. on March 2.

It happens that I was in Nicaragua this year as an election observer—a senior historian rejoicing in the chance for a close-up view of a bit of history in the making. I was fascinated by what I saw, and in my opinion, any direct comparison between the Sandinista regime and totalitarian Stalinist states is simplistic, at best. But that’s not my story here. History is my beat, so let us return to 1877.

That year, in three Southern states, conservatives recaptured power after nearly ten years of enforced racial and social revolution. They did so in a climate of electoral fraud, fear, and plain murder. And because the electoral votes of the three states would be the decisive ones in the presidential election, local disputes about who won state campaigns ripened into a national constitutional and political crisis that some thought might start a new civil war.

The country was approaching the end of the experiment that history knows as Reconstruction. Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina were the last states in which Republican regimes survived, based heavily on the votes of blacks. In 1867, Congress had decreed that the former Confederate states (with Tennessee a lone exception) would lose their autonomy and become occupied territory until they installed new governments from which all supporters of the former Confederacy were excluded and in which the ex-slaves would be included.

At varying speeds, the garrisoned states complied. Not surprisingly the newly elected officials were Republicans, representing classes previously excluded from power. As Southern folk speech put it, “the bottom rail was on the top.” Like most one-party regimes, they waxed in corruption the longer they held power, though not much beyond the average for the Gilded Age. And like most political organizations catering to lesser folk, they also did a great deal of yeoman work in the areas of education, social welfare, economic development, and the equalizing of tax burdens. They even gradually lifted the restrictions on ex-Confederates, hoping