important features of their policy where they could be overturned only by a Democratic capture of presidency and Senate.
327. In the midst of these changes the Supreme Court handed down decisions undoing important portions of the Reconstruction Supreme Court Decisions. system by restraining the tendency of the nation to encroach on the sphere of the state; and restricting the scope of the recent constitutional amendments. On the 14th of April 1873, in the Slaughter House cases, the courts held that the amendments were primarily restrictions upon the states for the protection of the freedom of the coloured man, rather than extensions of the power of the Federal government under the definition of United States citizenship, and that general fundamental civil rights remained under state protection. In the case of the United States v. Reese, decided on the 27th of March 1876, the court declared parts of the act of 1870 (which provided for the use of Federal force to protect the negro in his right to vote) unconstitutional, on the ground that they did not specify that the denial of suffrage must be on the sole ground of race or colour. A reasonable prerequisite, such as a poll tax, for voting was permissible. The South later took advantage of this decision to restrain negro suffrage indirectly. In United States v. Cruikshank (1876) the court held that the amendments to the Constitution left it still the duty of the state, rather than of the United States, to protect its citizens, even when whites had mobbed the negroes. The right of the nation in the case was held to be limited to taking care that the state governments and laws offered equal protection to whites and blacks. The affirmation of the power of the states over common carriers in the Granger cases (1877) has been mentioned. In 1883 the court declared the conspiracy clause of the Ku-Klux Act unconstitutional and restricted the application of the law to acts of a state through its officers and not to private citizens. In the same year it declared the Civil Rights Act of 1875 invalid.
328. In 1875 President Grant refused the appeala of the
“carpet-bagger” Governor Adelbert Ames of Mississippi to be
supported by troops, whereupon Ames resigned his office into the
hands of the Conservatives. The Mississippi plan of general
intimidation of negroes to keep them from the polls was followed
in Louisiana, South Carolina and Florida which alone remained
Republican. Thus steadily the radical Reconstruction policy
and Republican control of the South were being reversed.
It was made clear that negro suffrage could be enforced upon
the South only by military rule which could no longer command
Northern sympathy or the sanction of the Federal court.
Northern interest increasingly turned to other issues, and
especially to discontent over administrative corruption.
329. The spoils system had triumphed over the advocates of civil service reform to such an extent that Grant abandoned The Whisky Ring. the competitive system in 1875 on the ground that Congress did not support him in the policy. Enormous frauds in the collection of the internal revenue by the Whisky Ring with the connivance of Federal officials were revealed in 1875, and about the same time, Secretary of War William W. Belknap resigned to avoid impeachment for corruption in the conduct of Indian affairs. The enforced resignation in 1876 of Secretary of the Treasury Benjamin H. Bristow (q.v.) after he had successfully exposed the Whisky Ring, and of Postmaster-General Marshall Jewell, who had resisted the spoils system in his department, tended to discredit the administration. Blaine, the leader of the Republicans in the House of Representatives, fell under suspicion on account of his earlier relations with the Little Rock & Fort Smith and Northern Pacific railways (see Blaine, J. G.), which left it doubtful, in spite of his aggressive defence, whether he had not used his influence as speaker in previous Congresses to secure pecuniary advantages from land grant railways. This clouded Blaine's prospects for a presidential nomination, and the House of Representatives voted a resolution against the third term which Grant seemed not unwilling to accept.
330. Thus the campaign of 1876 approached, with the Republicans divided into (1) steadfast supporters of the Grant administration, (2) a discontented reform wing (which favoured ex-Secretary Bristow), and (3) an intermediate group which followed Blaine. This statesman made a bold stroke to shift Party Platforms of 1876. the fighting which the Democrats planned to make against the scandals of the administration, to the old time war issues. By proposing to exclude Jefferson Davis from amnesty, he goaded southern congressmen into indiscreet utterances which fanned anew the fires of sectional animosity. The Republican platform, while deprecating sectionalism, placed the war record of the party in the foreground and denounced the Democracy, because it counted upon the united South as its chief hope of success. A compromise candidate was selected in the person of Governor Rutherford B. Hayes, of Ohio, who had vigorously opposed the greenback movement in his state, and whose life and character, though little known to the general public, made him acceptable to the reform leaders of the party. The Democrats, demanding reform, economy, a revenue tariff and the repeal of the resumption clause of the act of 1875, chose the reform governor of New York, Samuel J. Tilden, as their candidate. The Independent National, or Greenback, party, which was to develop rapidly in the next two years, nominated Peter Cooper, a New York philanthropist, and demanded the repeal of the Resumption Act, and the enactment of a law providing a paper currency issued directly by the government, and convertible on demand into United States obligations bearing a rate of interest not exceeding one cent a day for each one hundred dollars and exchangeable for United States notes at par. It also proposed the suppression of bank paper, and was in general antagonistic to the bond-holding and banking interests.
331. The election proved to be a very close contest. Tilden, according to the count of both parties, had a plurality of over Hayes-Tilden Contest; the Electoral Commission. a quarter of a million votes, and at first the leading Republican journals conceded his election. He had carried New York, Indiana, New Jersey and Connecticut and, by the Democratic count, the solid South. But the Republican headquarters claimed the election of Hayes by one electoral vote, based on the belief that the states of South Carolina, Florida and Louisiana,[1] had gone Republican. Since these states were in the midst of the transition from negro to white government, and elections were notorious for fraudulent practices, a serious question was raised, first as to the proper authority to count the electoral vote, and second, how far it was permissible to go behind the returns of the state authorities to ascertain the validity of the canvass of the votes in the state. The political capacity and moderation of the nation were severely tested; but in the end a characteristic American solution was found by the creation of an Electoral Commission (q.v.) in which five associate justices of the Supreme Court were joined with an equal number of representatives from each of the two houses of Congress. The result was that this commission refused to “go behind the returns,” and Hayes was declared elected by one vote. To prevent the threatened danger of a filibuster by Democrats of the House of Representatives against the completion of the count until after legal date for the inauguration of the president, Hayes's friends agreed with leading Democrats that he would withdraw the Federal troops from Louisiana. Thus a new era began under a moderate and reforming Republican president, a close Republican Senate and a Democratic House of Representatives. The Southern question was not settled, but other issues of an economic and social nature increasingly forced themselves to the front. They were concealed in a measure by the fact that the following of each of the leading political parties was divided on financial policies, which resulted in attempts to compromise and evade the issue by the party managers. During the dozen years that followed Hayes's inauguration neither party held complete possession of both the executive and the two houses of Congress. His own moderate character, the conditions of his election and
