Rigging the 1876 election
Why Colorado became the Centennial State
While many factors explain the results of the disputed 1876 presidential election, which Rutherford Hayes won by a 185-184 tally in the electoral college, Colorado’s admission to the Union only 99 days before the voting clearly tipped the balance.
That wasn’t the first time that congressional partisans added states just before elections they were worried about winning. After carving out West Virginia in 1863, the Republican controlled Congress in 1864 tried to admit Nevada, Nebraska, and Colorado. Only Nevada met all the requirements. Colorado voters rejected statehood because they didn’t want the new taxes that would come with admission and they didn’t want to be subject to the civil war draft. Congress voted on Colorado statehood in subsequent years. The Senate killed a bill in 1866 in part because the proposed state constitution denied black men the right to vote. A later bill passed Congress but was vetoed by President Andrew Johnson.
In 1874, with all the former Confederate states sending delegations to Congress and with the country sinking into the worst depression prior to the 1930s, Democrats gained a 2/3 majority in the House and a majority in the Senate. Nevertheless, it was a Republican-controlled lame duck Congress that met in December 1874 and voted on statehood.
It’s an under-appreciated fact that all second term Congresses until 1935 met after the elections for their successors. Members already knew the outcomes and many were lame ducks.
The outgoing 43rd Congress approved a statehood bill for Colorado but insisted on delaying the state’s referendum until July 1876, presumably too late to affect the presidential elections. In fact, the referendum passed, and President Grant signed the statehood law on August 1. But look what happened next:
In a classic moment of Gilded Age corruption, pro-statehood voters reportedly voted several times over in the July 1 referendum. However, the vote was never formally challenged, and Colorado entered the Union as the 38th state. After Republicans swept the new state’s elections on Tuesday, October 3, the new legislature added a provision to the state constitution that provided that the legislature would choose the state’s electors in its first presidential election year, and afterwards the voters would. Not surprisingly, the Re-publican legislature chose Republican electors who inevitably voted for the Republican presidential nominee, Rutherford B. Hayes. Colorado’s votes were not challenged in Congress, and when the electoral dispute was settled, Hayes was counted in as the nineteenth president of the United States.
That means that Hayes’ one-vote margin over Tilden came in part because the GOP-controlled Colorado legislature chose the electors rather than the voters in a separate election.
This wasn’t the last time that Colorado lawmakers tried to rig the vote. In 1893 the legislature established a referendum on women’s suffrage that voters approved by a 55%-45% majority, thus making Colorado the first state to let women vote. [The territories of Wyoming and Utah had done the same earlier.]
Isn’t it a good thing that Colorado gave women the vote 27 years before the 19th amendment to the Constitution was adopted? Yes, but the voters did the right thing for the wrong reason. They empowered women in order to dilute the power of unmarried miners.
Proponents in the West partly viewed the right to vote as a way to attract more women — white women — to live in the Western states and territories, where they were desired to help “civilize” the area with “women’s higher sense of morality,” as it was perceived in “the understanding of the genders of the time,” said Shelby Balik, Ph.D., associate professor of history at Metropolitan State University of Denver. “Really, when offering women the right to vote, they were thinking of white women,” she said.
Readers here know that I am proud of my home state despite its flaws. I also believe we should learn a full and honest history of our country.
America has a long record of manipulating laws to help win elections. That’s why we need to be on guard against measures that may sound good but are motivated by selfish reasons or have undemocratic consequences.