Author Interview--Adam Fairclough (Bulldozed and Betrayed) Part 2

Niels Eichhorn Discussion

Hello H-CivWar Readers:

Today we continue our conversation with Adam Fairclough to talk about his new book, Bulldozed and Betrayed: Louisiana and the Stolen Elections of 1876, published by the Louisiana State University Press in September 2021.

Part 1

What happened in those five parishes in Louisiana where both sides claimed victory?

AF: The Democrats adopted a Janus-face strategy in 1876.  In most of the State they abstained from violence during the campaign, and election day itself was peaceful throughout.  They knew that the Republican-controlled State Returning Board was empowered to reject polls on the grounds that voters had been subjected to violence and intimidation.  A free and fair vote, however, would likely result in a Republican victory, Louisiana having a slight black majority.  They therefore aimed to suppress the Republican vote in five majority-black parishes.  Their campaign of intimidation and violence began in 1874 with the forced resignation of Republican officials; in 1876 it morphed into an effort to break up Republican clubs and dragoon black voters into Democratic clubs.  The “bulldozing” included the silencing of Republican leaders by means of threats, whippings, and assassinations.  

The beauty of these tactics from the Democrats’ point of view was that they would not simply deter blacks from voting Republican but also force them into casting Democratic ballots.  By such means did the Democrats carry the previously reliably Republican parishes of Morehouse, Ouachita, East Baton Rouge, and East and West Feliciana.  In East Feliciana the Republicans were so afraid that they did not put up a ticket.  The Returning Board duly rejected the results in these “bulldozed” parishes, arguing that a free and fair vote would have produced Republican majorities.  In disallowing these polls, however, the Returning Board had to throw out votes cast by blacks as well as ones cast by whites.  It was not enough therefore to overturn the Democratic majority statewide.  In order to elect Hayes and Packard the Returning Board had to throw out polls in additional parishes, sometimes on the basis of very dubious evidence.

You are telling a tale that is just beyond belief in Louisiana, but it feels you have a few warnings as well. One of them being that if you open an investigation it may lead in directions you did not want to go. How much did Democrats regret creating this committee by the end?

AF: The Democrats who pushed to create the Potter Committee considered it a risk-free way of harassing the Hayes administration and preparing the ground for Tilden’s renomination in 1880.  Risk-free because at the same time that the Democratic House set up the committee, it also voted not to challenge Hayes’s title to the presidency.  A modern parallel might be the Republican-led investigations into the killing in Benghazi of the U.S. Ambassador to Libya in 2012: it was a convenient stick with which to beat a president of the opposing party.

Yet in 1878 the investigation turned out to be far from risk-free.  Indeed, a number of Democrats warned that re-opening the issue of the disputed presidential election might well rebound on their party.  These naysayers had good reason to advise caution: they knew all about, and had sometimes participated in, Democratic schemes to bribe Republican election officials and presidential electors—schemes pursued by close allies of Tilden and coordinated by Tilden’s nephew.  They also knew that incriminating telegrams had flown back and forth that would discredit Tilden if they ever saw the light of day.  The telegrams were written in code, but rare was the cipher that could not be cracked.

This is precisely what happened.  On top of the embarrassment of seeing their star witnesses exposed as liars and perjurers, the Potter Committee suffered the humiliation of having to examine Tilden, his nephew, and his close political associates after the New York Tribune decoded and published the telegrams.  The investigation failed to discredit Hayes but did end up ending Tilden’s political career.  Rarely has an investigation backfired in such a spectacular fashion.

Now, one question that has been burning in me since I read your book over the Holidays. I know you did not write this book in a year, but the past year has changed the environment quite a bit—how have the false claims by the previous president about election fraud and then the events on January 6, 2020 given a contemporary appeal to your book that you could not have foreseen? Have these events you studied with the Potter Committee and events in the last election caused you to think more about how much/little has changed in the United States?

AF: The insurrection of January 6 was an attempted coup d’etat by a defeated president.  It is a unique and unprecedented event in American history.  Commentators have noted that the refusal to accept election results, and attempted coups, are the characteristics of “banana republics.”  In 1876-77 people did not yet speak of “banana republics.”  But they did have a contemporary equivalent: Mexico.  The southern neighbor of the U.S. was a byword for political instability and violent politics.  The political classes constantly warned against the “Mexicanization” of American politics.  Moreover, memories of the Civil War were still fresh.  The leaders of both parties were therefore determined to resolve the disputed presidential election without violence.  When Henry Watterson, editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal, called for 100,000 Democrats to rally in Washington in support of Tilden, leading Democrats shot down the proposal.  The prospect of violent disorder in the nation’s capital—the possibility of a mob trying to coerce Congress--terrified them.  What happened in 2020-21 was therefore far worse in some respects than the situation in 1876-77.  The Compromise of 1877 is rightly criticized as a betrayal of the South’s Republicans that paved the way for disfranchisement and Jim Crow.  But in acceding to the peaceful inauguration of Hayes, Democratic leaders displayed far more statesmanship and political wisdom than those Republicans who facilitated, encouraged, and defended the insurrection of January 6.

There was another key difference between 1876-77 and 2020-21: the dispute over the election of 1876 was genuine; the dispute over the results in 2021 had no basis in fact.  In 1876 the elections in Louisiana and other southern states were marred by “bulldozing” on the part of Democrats and false counting by Republicans.  Establishing who “really” carried Louisiana, South Carolina, and Florida was all but impossible because the elections there had been anything but free and fair.  In order to assuage Democratic anger over Republican returning boards having awarded those states to Hayes—and also to satisfy Republicans who felt queasy about those returning boards--Congress created an Electoral Commission to arbitrate the dispute.  The eight Republicans on the 15-man commission voted to accept the official results from those three states, thus confirming Hayes as president-elect.  Crucially, they decided that the commission should not “go behind the returns.”  In other words, Congress could not act as a national canvassing board by deciding on questions of alleged “bulldozing” and fraud.  Any complaints of that sort had to be resolved by the states.  In 2020-21, Republicans complaints about the election had been resolved by the states; there was nothing for Congress to arbitrate.

Congressional Republicans who objected to the results in the key “swing” states in 2021 invoked the Electoral Commission of 1877 as a precedent.  But the parallel was false.  For one thing, there was no instances of serious electoral fraud to investigate, and Biden’s win in the swing states had been certified by Republican election boards and Republican state legislatures; Trump’s own attorney general dismissed the allegations of fraud.  State and federal courts unanimously rejected Republican complaints, save in one case in Pennsylvania that made no difference to the results in that state.  In the second place, as noted above, the 1877 commission did not judge on allegations of electoral wrongdoing.  It ruled that once a legally elected legislature certified its presidential electors, Congress was obliged to accept them.

There is, of course, yet another reason why January 6 was far worse than what happened in 1877.  When the Electoral Commission decided the contest in Hayes’ favor, Democrats accepted the outcome.  They called Hayes “His Fraudulency” but never considered removing him through impeachment or by some other means.  Indeed, most Democrats were relieved to see an end to the crisis and a return to political stability.  The situation today is very different.  Trump refuses to accept his defeat and is paving the way, in plain sight, for a repeat of January 6.  Gilded Age politicians have taken a lot of stick from historians.  They look much better when compared with today’s crop of Republican leaders.  

Very good points and insightful. Speaking of parallels and the example of Mexico. Before this will get published, I probably will publish a blog to look at foreign reactions to the 1876 election and Potter Committee—your book was that inspiring. In that research, I found a really interesting paragraph in the Pall Mall Gazette from 1880 that I want to share with you and see what you think:

“Thus there is the most singular toleration of acknowledged foul play by both the players; and this is all the more noteworthy because communities and Governments, far less scrupulous on the whole, have proved extremely intolerant of electoral fraud. If ever there was a Government which might be supposed capable of it, it was that of the Second French Empire. The Ministers and prefects of Napoleon III did not indeed neglect some American precedents; to use the American phrase, they often ‘gerrymandered’ the constituencies by grouping them so as to produce a favorable result; but they never ventured to tamper with the ballot-box.”

AF: Well, comparing the democracy of the United States with that of the French Second Empire is like comparing apples and pears.  Napoleon III never needed to stuff ballot boxes because the French parliament, although elected on the basis of universal manhood suffrage, had very little power.  Decision-making was concentrated in the person of the emperor.  Moreover, freedom of the press was restricted, as was political opposition.  There was no real party system.  In the United States it was the very intensity of party conflict, and the high stakes involved, that encouraged electoral fraud.  Flawed as it was, American democracy was far more vital than anything that existed in Europe at that time.  The U.K., for example, was a long way from being a democracy.  The 1867 Reform Act had extended the franchise, but voting was still a minority right.  The Reform Act of 1884 extended the franchise further, and a majority of adult males (probably) could now vote.  But it was only in 1918 that universal manhood suffrage became a reality.  It took many decades, moreover, to eliminate corruption—especially bribery and intimidation--from British elections.  We need to be careful, therefore, in making comparisons.

Today, of course, it is perfectly sound, methodologically, to compare the American political system, and its method of conducting elections, with that of other democracies.  When those comparisons are made, that of the United States comes out badly.  As Francis Fukuyama has suggested, the United States functions not so much as a democracy as a “vetocracy.”  A single senator can, in effect, block legislative action.  And the system for electing a president is so complex that it offers numerous opportunities for a bad-faith actor like Trump to jam up the works.  January 6 entailed a physical assault on the first branch of government that was encouraged and condoned by the second branch.  It delivered a grievous wound to American democracy and the U.S. Constitution.  Whether that wound proves fatal is something no historian can or should predict.

You have retired now and you have an extensive publication record already, do you have any plans to continue writing history?

AF: In the past, my topics have “chosen me” in the sense that I would get fascinated by a subject and believed that if I found that subject compelling then I could make it interesting to others, as long as I told the story with sufficient conviction and narrative skill.  Then one topic would lead to another.  Looking back, I realize that there is a kind of logical trajectory.  My interest in American history was first sparked when, as a small boy, I became what is known here as a “Civil War buff”—rather in the manner described by the late Tony Horwitz in Confederates in the Attic.  As I grew to maturity (or what passes for it) I became faintly embarrassed by my Civil War obsession.  Everything I have written, however, has in some way involved the consequences of the Civil War, and my book on Reconstruction, The Revolution that Failed, took me back to that conflict and made extensive use of the Official Records of the Rebellion and other period sources.  With Bulldozed and Betrayed, however, I seem to have come to a full stop; it does not lead to anything else.  There is another reason why I am hesitant to embark on a new book.  My earlier books were optimistic in tone.  Despite dealing with the ugliness of racism, I found the history of black activism and institution-building inspiring.  My last two books, on the other hand, are darker and even a tad cynical.  When writing about Reconstruction, there is no happy ending.  Perhaps this darker tone reflects the current poisonous state of American politics.  In any case, no fresh topic has thus far “grabbed me.”

Or rather, a new topic
has grabbed me, but it has nothing to do with American history.  I have been reading extensively about the history of Fleet Street—the legendary home of Britain’s national newspapers—during its heyday in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s.  My interest has a personal source: my father, Alan Fairclough, worked in Fleet Street between 1944 and 1973, first with The Observer, but mostly with the Daily Mirror, a brash, left-of-center tabloid that had the biggest circulation in the world.  What will come out of this research I don’t yet know; perhaps merely an unpublished piece to be shared with members of my family.  In the meantime, I am waiting for that flash of inspiration that might suggest another book in the field of U.S. history.