Centennial Crisis: The Disputed Election of 1876 by William H. Rehnquist, Alfred A. Knopf, 274 pages, $26
AS Chief Justice of the United States, William Rehnquist knows a thing or two about disputed presidential elections – having helped decide one himself a few years back. But don’t expect any dramatic revelations about the Bush-Gore contest here.
In this slim, but informative, volume, Rehnquist explores the national nightmare in which an unprecedented special commission awarded Rutherford Hayes the presidency over Samuel Tilden by a single vote – only two days before the inauguration.
The reason for the mess is that the Constitution is silent about who decides any dispute about the results of a state’s election returns. Three states – including, ironically, Florida – submitted conflicting results to Congress as it counted the electoral votes.
Unsure of what to do, Congress appointed a commission to decide whether it was legally allowed to “go behind” the official state returns and, essentially, recount and re-evaluate the ballots.
Sound familiar?
If you thought the events of 2000 prompted partisan bitterness, that was nothing compared to what happened during America’s centennial year (hence the book’s title). As the dispute dragged on, with no sign of being resolved, the country quite literally was on the verge of another civil war.
Unfortunately, Rehnquist often wanders far afield in this telling. He provides a full biography of just about every person mentioned in the book, even those who are tangential to the central narrative.
But it’s when he begins dissecting the post-election controversy – and, particularly, the legal principles involved – that the chief justice’s book proves its worth. Happily, he does so without resorting to dry legalities; at all times this is an immensely readable work, even for non-lawyers and non-historians.
Rehnquist states flatly that the events of 1876 “should be interesting and perhaps instructive” when evaluating the 2000 election, but he never gets more explicit than that.
Implicitly, though, it’s possible to appreciate the argument Rehnquist is trying to make. He defends both the conduct and the legal reasoning of Supreme Court Justice Joseph Bradley, who cast the deciding vote that elected Hayes.
It’s a judgment with which most historians take issue – conventional wisdom says that Tilden had the election stolen from him – but Rehnquist makes a convincing case.
In so staunchly standing by a past colleague who decided a presidential election, Rehnquist clearly is making a very definite point about the Supreme Court’s ultimate wisdom throughout the ages.
