1870 Presidential Election
The 1870 election in the United States was significant as it marked the first time African American men were able to vote in the Southern states following the passage of the 15th Amendment. This election saw the Republican Party gain significant support from African American voters, leading to the election of several African American politicians to state and federal offices.
6 Key excerpts on "1870 Presidential Election"
eBook - ePub- A. James Fuller(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- The Kent State University Press(Publisher)
...Introduction The Election of 1860 Reconsidered A. James Fuller The most important presidential election in American history took place in 1860. The electoral contest marked the culmination of the sectional conflict and led to the secession of the Southern states and the beginning of the Civil War. Over the past century and a half, scholars have offered a number of different interpretations of the election, but surprisingly few works have been dedicated exclusively to the presidential contest itself. Most explanations of the campaign appear in general histories or in biographies of Abraham Lincoln or the other presidential candidates. Although nearly every succeeding generation of historians has managed to produce at least one full-length study, scholarship on the election of 1860 remains relatively rare. The sesquicentennial anniversary of the election offered an opportunity to fill this gap in the literature. Historians have taken up the cause, producing several new books on the subject, including this one. 1 This volume reconsiders the election and offers fresh insights on the campaigns for the presidency. In his concluding essay, Douglas G. Gardner examines the historiographical tradition regarding the election, noting that scholars across the generations have focused on Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas, with scant attention paid to the other candidates or to other related topics. Two of the essays clearly fall into that scholarly tradition—Michael S. Green argues that Lincoln played the role of master politician during the campaign, and James L. Huston explores the significance of Douglas’s southern tour. The other chapters move in different directions, and even those chapters dedicated to the Rail Splitter and the Little Giant provide new interpretations of the two most famous presidential candidates. But this book breaks new ground by seeing the election as more than Lincoln’s victory and Douglas’s loss...
eBook - ePub- Brian Holden Reid(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...‘Already the people of the North taunt us with inability and cowardice’. A concern with such moral imperatives drew politicians to act even though they had not thought out the object and compass of their acts or their consequences very systematically. But even sceptics were anxious to show that they were prepared for action of some kind and agreed that whatever was undertaken should be consonant with the action of other southern states and coordinated jointly with them. 54 But the policy of waiting on events surrendered more of the initiative to the ‘ultras’, offered even less space for manoeuvre, and rendered the final act, when it came, a colossal gamble. The presidential election of 1860 is also significant because of the splintering of the Democratic Party, the sole remaining political grouping which straddled the two sections. The Democratic Party was not only a national institution, but also a political force that was allied with, and drew much of its strength from, the South. The issues of the election did not revolve around the continuance of slavery in the states, only its restriction there. By refusing to accept the protection of northern Democrats, the southern pro-slavery party unwittingly (and in some cases wittingly) shattered that political grouping best able to defend their peculiar institution. They sought to replace it with a purely southern political structure which, if it sought to safeguard slavery outside the Union, would have to rely on force. This was a huge risk, for it staked the survival of slavery in the southern states on the southern ability to defend it. This had not been an issue in the election itself. By their precipitate and rash conduct, the secessionists dramatically increased the stakes of the contest and risked all that they held dear. The election confirmed the political authority and electoral support of the Republican Party in the North...
eBook - ePub- John David Smith(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- The Kent State University Press(Publisher)
...The Democrats did well enough in that election to win control of the House of Representatives. According to Calhoun, the Forty-Third Congress, which closed on March 4, 1875, signaled the end of the era of Republican dominance. This insight matters because nearly every American history textbook cites the contested presidential election of 1876 as the turning point for Reconstruction, with the implicit argument that the 1876 campaign led to the abandonment of the freedpeople and their southern Republican allies to Democratic “redeemers.” Calhoun, however, insists that the results of the 1874 election were clear: Republicans could not expect to dominate national politics if they focused solely on Reconstruction. Moreover, once Republicans had to share one of the branches of government with their Democratic counterparts, enacting policy would prove to be far more difficult than it previously had been. Once divided government (where one party does not monopolize the legislative and executive branches) characterized Washington, D.C., any progress on Reconstruction issues would be nearly impossible to achieve. This key observation helps demonstrate the limits and possibilities that one could reasonably expect from American political leaders during the mid-1870s. If strong Reconstruction policies could be achieved only along partisan lines, then Reconstruction clearly was a more fragile political experiment than many historians have realized. 12 In a compelling recent article, historian Nicholas Barreyre calls attention to the important effects of the Panic of 1873 on the nation’s political system. Arguing persuasively that too few historians have focused on the political consequences of the devastating economic downturn, Barreyre encourages scholars to examine the “politics of the 1873 crisis.” By this the author contends that although the panic was financial in nature, the most important ramifications manifested themselves in politics...
- Jeffery A. Jenkins, Justin Peck(Authors)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- University of Chicago Press(Publisher)
...Despite the racially charged political atmosphere, the fall 1872 elections came off with minimal violence. When the votes were counted Grant was reelected in a landslide, capturing almost 56 percent of the popular vote and 286 of 352 electoral votes. 96 Grant also won eight of the eleven Southern states (losing only Georgia, Tennessee, and Texas). His victory increased the percentage of Republican House seats in the former Confederacy, reversing a trend and suggesting that perhaps the GOP was positioned for long-standing Southern success. 97 Republicans added sixty-three House seats overall, creating a 199-88 advantage over the Democrats. 98 In the Senate they lost nine seats but retained an overwhelming 47-19 majority. 99 The Republican victory in fall 1872 was impressive, and the political situation in the South over the preceding several years suggested that a period of “normal” two-party electoral competition might be developing. Despite continued violence toward black voters by paramilitary groups, race was not defining electoral politics as it had done immediately after Reconstruction began. Former Whigs had ascended to leadership in both the Democratic and Republican Parties in the South, and they worked to downplay race. Each side sought to appeal to voters based on economic issues, and there was real hope that the virtues of Reconstruction—civil and political rights for African Americans—would become settled policy and “the new normal.” 100 But any optimism about the future was short-lived. Only one year later—in late 1873—the nation’s largest banks collapsed amid a series of railroad bankruptcies and a credit crisis. As American financial institutions seized up, panic spread across the country. Surging unemployment destroyed the livelihood of workers in the country’s major urban centers, the price of agricultural products collapsed along with the value of land, and violent conflicts between workers and their bosses occurred in several cities...
- Gregory Feldmeth, Christine Custred(Authors)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Research & Education Association(Publisher)
...Chapter 7 Expansion, Divisions, Civil War, and Reconstruction (1844–1877) The issues that would dominate American political discussions in the 1840s were sectionalism, territorial expansion, and slavery. Southerners in Congress increasingly found themselves in disagreement with their Northern colleagues on a number of questions, including tariffs, the presence of slavery in newly acquired territories, and federal funding of internal improvements such as roads and canals. Slavery was the most divisive issue, leading Congress to pass a “gag rule” in 1836 to prevent any discussion of the topic in either the House of Representatives or the Senate. Preventing its discussion in Congress did not reduce the impact of slavery or resolve the problems it created for the United States. The 1850s witnessed the hardening of both sides in their attitudes toward slavery and states’ rights. It finally took the Civil War and a huge loss of life to bring an end to slavery. Following the war, the nation stumbled through a period of Reconstruction as the South re-entered the Union politically, if not entirely culturally. The Election of 1844 Democratic front-runner Martin Van Buren and Whig front-runner Henry Clay agreed privately that neither would endorse Texas annexation and that it would not become a campaign issue in the 1844 presidential election, but expansionists at the Democratic convention succeeded in dumping Van Buren in favor of James K. Polk. Polk, called “Young Hickory” by his supporters, was a staunch Jacksonian who opposed protective tariffs and a national bank but, most important, favored territorial expansion, including not only annexation of Texas but also occupation of all the Oregon country (up to latitude 54°40') hitherto jointly occupied by the U.S. and Britain...
eBook - ePubUnto a Good Land
A History of the American People, Volume 2: From 1865
- David Edwin Harrell, Edwin S. Gaustad, John B. Boles, Sally Foreman Griffith(Authors)
- 2005(Publication Date)
- Eerdmans(Publisher)
...Such a view distorts the political picture. Political instability rather than Republican monopoly ruled much of the day. The two major national parties were evenly matched. With power within the grasp of each party, they fought fierce battles for the White House and congressional seats. Third parties also arose to challenge the two-party hegemony and to push into the political arena such issues as monetary policy, civil service reform, labor relations, and farm support. A Delicate Balance of Power Sometimes large electoral majorities in presidential contests disguised the thin popular support for the victors. No Republican presidential candidate ever won a majority of the popular vote in any election from 1876 to 1892, and in both 1876 and 1888 the defeated Democratic candidates outpolled the Republican winners in popular votes. Single-term presidencies broke the continuity of policy-making and fostered excessive politicking and brokering by ambitious political chieftains in Congress and in the states. After Ulysses S. Grant’s retirement from office in 1877, no incumbent president was re-elected until William McKinley in 1900. In such a rickety political structure, politicians shied away from bold stands. And on issues such as currency reform and regulation of the industrial economy, where Republicans and Democrats feared to tread lest they alienate moneyed interests and the broad electorate each courted assiduously, third parties entered. A seeming politics of stalemate resulted until farm radicalism and economic depression reshaped the political landscape in the election of 1896. National politics seesawed because it rested on a delicate balance of power. The two major parties consisted of alliances of regional and interest groups that held together by avoiding clear-cut positions on potentially divisive issues that might tear the parties apart and by invoking common symbols and interests that might unite their disparate factions...
