By Patrick T. Conley

Now that the dust (and the dirt) of the latest presidential race has settled, it may be instructive to look back and view Rhode Island’s crucial role in the most bizarre and problematic presidential contest of them all. No, it was not Bush vs. Gore. In 1876, New York’s Democratic governor, Samuel J. Tilden, sought to regain the presidency from the Republicans–the party that saved the Union but whose harsh though well-intentioned Reconstruction of the South was then dividing it. The young GOP countered with Ohio Governor Rutherford B. Hayes.

Historians have written extensively about this most controversial ethically flawed and legally questionable election in American history in far more depth than this brief Rhode Island-oriented commentary can provide. Suffice it to say that political reformer Tilden received nearly 252,000 more votes than Hayes but contested returns in Florida (even then), Louisiana, and South Carolina–due to intimidation of voters by Southern Democrats and ballot fraud by the still surviving Republican Reconstruction regimes–put the nineteen electoral votes from those three states in doubt. In addition, there was an irregularity in Oregon involving a single vote.

After the initial tally, Tilden had the votes of 184 electors, one short of the then-required majority, while Hayes trailed with 165 (or was it 164?). An allegedly bipartisan Electoral Commission was created to determine who would receive the 20 disputed ballots. The Republicans controlled this board by a margin of 8 to 7. Not surprisingly, the commission voted 8 to 7 to validate each state’s Republican electors, giving Hayes the simple majority of 185 needed to become the nineteenth president of the United States. My historical analysis places Louisiana’s eight votes in the Tilden column. The most recent scholarly book on this fiasco, written by Roy Morris Jr., is entitled Fraud of the Century: Rutherford B. Hayes, Samuel Tilden and the Stolen Election of 1876. 

During his one-term tenure, the Democrats derisively called the victor “Rutherfraud” Hayes. In this era, sometimes called “the Gilded Age,” Rhode Island was solidly Republican. In the general election, the state’s voters preferred Hayes over Tilden by the comfortable margin of 15,787 to 10,712, so Rhode Island’s four electoral votes appeared to be safely in the Hayes column. This appearance has caused American historians to ignore Rhode Island when dealing with the Electoral College crisis. However, one might argue that the single vote by which Hayes was elected was cast belatedly by a Rhode Island presidential elector chosen by the Republican majority of the General Assembly after it had been discovered that the famous inventor and industrialist George H. Corliss–one of the four Rhode Island electors–was ineligible to vote for president because he held “an office of trust or profit under the United States,” as defined in Article II, Section 1 of the Federal Constitution. Corliss, whose great steam engine was the centerpiece of the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, had been appointed the commissioner from Rhode Island on the United States Centennial Commission. This federal office disqualified him as an elector. Thus stated the Rhode Island Supreme Court in an advisory opinion to Republican governor Henry Lippitt, (In re George H. Corliss, 11 RI 638).

With Corliss declared ineligible, three scenarios were possible: (1) take no action to replace Corliss, in which case the presidential election would result in a tie that the Democratic House of Representatives, following constitutional guidelines, would break in favor of Tilden; (2) give the position of elector to the next highest vote-getter (i.e., one of the four Democratic electors); or (3) revive the original eighteenth-century procedure whereby the General Assembly chose the presidential electors.