Theda Skocpol, “Bringing the State Back In: Strategies of Analysis in Current Research,” in Bringing the State Back In, ed. Peter Evans et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Stephen Krasner, Defending the National Interest: Raw Materials Investments and U.S. Foreign Policy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984); Eric Nordlinger, On the Autonomy of the Democratic State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981); Eric Nordlinger, “Taking the State Seriously,” in Understanding Political Development, ed. Myron Weiner and Samuel Huntington (Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1987); Samuel Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968); J.P. Nettl, “The State as a Conceptual Variable,” World Politics 20 (1968): 559–92.

David Truman, The Governmental Process (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1956); Robert Dahl, Pluralist Democracy in the United States: Conflict and Consensus (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1967); Walter Dean Burnham, Critical Elections and the Mainsprings of American Politics (New York: Norton Books, 1970).

For example, one scholar claims that “what previously passed for an agenda is now common wisdom – the state is ‘back in' . . . politics is now the new center piece of the social problem, not a mere epiphenomenon” (Stephen Skowronek, “What's Wrong with APD?” Studies in American Political Development 17 [2003]: 110). For studies focusing on the social basis of political conflict, see Richard Bensel, The Political Economy of American Industrialization, 1877–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Martin Shefter, Political Parties and the State: The American Historical Experience (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994); Richard Bensel, Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859–1877 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Elizabeth Sanders, Roots of Reform: Farmers, Workers, and the American State, 1877–1917 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1999); Daniel Carpenter, The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy: Reputations, Networks, and Policy Innovation in Executive Agencies, 1862–1928 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).

As two founders of the field note, [recent studies often] dissolve any stark analytic separation between state and society. As it has turned out, ‘bringing the state back in' has been less a matter of asserting the ‘autonomy' of government institutions than a matter of asserting the primacy of the categorical realm of authority within which social relations are organized, political identities formed, and transformative ambitions directed. (Stephen Skowronek and Karen Orren, The Search for American Political Development [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004], 19) Similarly, others conclude: “Having ‘brought the state back in,' . . . scholars now recognize that the ‘fit' between public officials and organized constituencies . . . limits the autonomy of the state” (Brian Balogh, “Preserving American Political Development as a Multidisciplinary Field” [unpub. mss., 2004].

The possibility that characteristics of mass opinion grants elected officials autonomy from societal oversight has been tangentially recognized by several studies, but has never been directly confronted or developed. See Robert Wiebe, The Opening of American Society: From the Adoption of the Constitution to the Eve of Disunion (New York: Alfred A. Knopf), 351–52; Richard Bensel, The American Ballot Box in the Mid Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2003), chap. 7; Ronald Formisano, The Birth of Mass Political Parties, Michigan, 1827–1861 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), 11–12. I draw heavily from Philip Converse, “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics,” in Ideology and Discontent, ed. David Apter (New York: Free Press, 1964). For general theoretical orientations to this approach, see Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publishers, 1971); Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York: Harper), 261–64; Robert Michels, Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy (New York: Free Press, 1962), 111, 65–67, 70–71, 107–14; Gaetano Mosca, The Ruling Class (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1939), 50–53; Walter Lippman, Public Opinion (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1921); Walter Lippman, The Phantom Public (New York: Macmillan Co., 1930), 47–48, 61–62, 71; Murray Edelman, The Symbolic Uses of Politics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1967); Benjamin Ginsberg, The Captive Public: How Mass Opinion Promotes State Power (New York: Basic Books, 1986).

See Oscar and Mary Flug Handlin, Commonwealth: A Study of the Role of Government in the American Economy: Massachusetts, 1774–1861 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1947); Louis Hartz, Economic Policy and Democratic Thought: Pennsylvania, 1776–1860 (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1948); William Novak, The People's Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Colleen Dunlavy, “Mirror Images: Political Structure and Early Railroad Policy in the United States and Prussia,” Studies in American Political Development 5 (1991): 1–35.

Samuel Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968), chap. 2; Martin Shefter, Political Parties and the State: The American Historical Experience (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994); Bensel, Yankee Leviathan; Political Economy.

William Gienapp, “‘Politics Seem to Enter into Everything': Political Culture in the North, 1840–1860,” in Essays on American Antebellum Politics, 1840–1860, ed. Stephen Maizlish and John Kushma (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1982), 6.

Glen Altschuler and Stuart M. Blumin, “Limits of Political Engagement in Antebellum America: A New Look at the Golden Age of Participatory Democracy,” Journal of American History 84 (1997): 855; Michael E. McGerr, The Decline of Popular Politics: The American North, 1865–1928 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Paul Kleppner, The Third Electoral System, 1853–1892 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979); James A. Morone, The Democratic Wish: Popular Participation and the Limits of American Government (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990); Joel Silbey, The American Political Nation, 1838–1893 (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991); Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2000); Jean Baker, Affairs of Party: The Political Culture of Northern Democrats in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983); Walter Dean Burnham, “Theory and Voting Research: Some Reflections on Converse's ‘Change in the American Electorate,'” American Political Science Review 68 (1974): 1002–1023.

Altschuler and Blumin, “Limits of Political Engagement,” 856.

Heather Cox Richardson, The Greatest Nation of the Earth: Republican Economic Policies During the Civil War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 9; Baker, Affairs of Party, 23.

Bensel, Political Economy, 17; Elizabeth Sanders, “Industrial Concentration, Sectional Competition, and Antitrust Politics in America, 1880–1890,” Studies in American Political Development 1 (1986): 142–214; Elizabeth Sanders, Roots of Reform: Farmers, Workers, and the American State 1877–1917 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1999); Gretchen Ritter, Goldbugs and Greenbacks: The Antimonopoly Tradition and the Politics of Finance in America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Michael Schudson, The Good Citizen: A History of American Civic Life (New York: Free Press, 1998); Barry Weingast, “Political Stability and Civil War: Institutions, Commitment, and American Democracy,” in Analytic Narratives, ed. Robert Bates et al. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 148–93; Thomas Gilligan, William J. Marshal, and Barry R. Weingast, “Regulation and the Theory of Legislative Choice: The Interstate Commerce Act of 1887,” Journal of Law and Economics 32 (1989): 35–61.

Sanders, Roots of Reform, 4; Elizabeth Sanders, “State Theory and American Political Development,” Studies in Law, Politics, and Society 10 (1990): 95.

Sanders, Roots of Reform, 4–6. This is also the conclusion of studies investigating the autonomous power of government. See Krasner, Protecting the National Interest, 62, 64. Assuming that Congress was closely tied to social demands poses clear problems for any study of the autonomous power of the nineteenth-century federal government. If the executive was the only branch capable of autonomous action, nineteenth-century doctrines of legislative dominance and the norms prohibiting the executive from advocating, or even endorsing, specific policies indicates that studies of American state formation must remain tied to fundamentally socially reductionist frameworks. Only after providing explanations for how elected officials could escape constituency oversight can we assert the existence of autonomous governmental power. On the power of the nineteenth-century legislature, see John Sherman, John Sherman's Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet (Chicago: Werner Company, 1896), 447; Leonard D. White, The Republican Era: A Study in Administrative History, 1869–1901 (New York: Free Press, 1958), chap. 2; Jeffrey Tulis, The Rhetorical Presidency (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987); Joseph Cooper and Cheryl D. Young, “Bill Introduction in the Nineteenth Century: A Study of Institutional Change,” Legislative Studies Quarterly 14 (1989): 67–105.

Bensel, Political Economy, 102.

Carpenter, Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy, 14; William Nelson, The Roots of American Bureaucracy, 1830–1900 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982).

Carpenter, Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy, 367.

Bensel, Yankee Leviathan, 5; Huntington, Political Order, 129. Bensel rejects this position; the quote refers to the modernization theorists whom he criticizes.

Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 136.

Daniel Carpenter, “State Building through Reputation Building: Coalitions of Esteem and Program Innovation in the National Postal System, 1883–1913,” Studies in American Political Development 14 (2000): 123.

Ronald Formisano, “The ‘Party Period' Revisited,” Journal of American History 86 (1999): 94.

I am essentially defining society as being synonymous with the electorate. Later, I will refer to business and financial groups, which are not nominally parts of “the state,” as groups separate from “society” (the electorate). For analytic purposes, I define the state as that collectivity of individuals from whose decisions there is no legitimate appeal. I avoid Weber's classic definition as it both highlights “coercive” features of the state that are deployed only in exceptional instances, and because of Weber's own recognition that “coercion is exercised to a considerable extent by the private owners of the means of production and acquisition, to whom the law guarantees their property and whose power can thus manifest itself in the competitive struggle of the market” (Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology [Berkeley: University of California Press], 730). If the “private” owners of capital can coerce those dependent upon their investment decisions (as they most certainly can), the conceptual distinction between “state” and “society” is quickly blurred. This is not to minimize the fact that much of what the nineteenth-century American state did was actually quite coercive. Rather it is merely to point out that there is no clear conceptual differentiation between the “coercion” exerted by the “private” owners of capital and “coercion” arising out of “public” decisions which influenced the distribution of goods, services, or property rights.

Gabriel Almond, “The Return to the State,” American Political Science Review 82 (1988): 855; Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Evelyne H. Stephens and John D. Stephens, Capitalist Development and Democracy (Chicago: Chicago University Press). As Almond notes: The tendency to abandon the state concept and replace it by other concepts was attributable to the enormous political mobilization that took place in the Western world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the proliferation of new political institutions – political parties, pressure groups, the mass media, and the like – that accompanied it. (ibid., 855)

Richard T. Ely, An Introduction to Political Economy (New York: Hunt and Eaton, 1894), 85–88.

Skocpol, “Bringing the State Back in,” 9; Huntington, Political Order, 20–21; James Mar. and Johan Olsen, “The New Institutionalism: Organizational Factors in Political Life,” American Political Science Review 78 (1984): 734–89. It is tempting to conclude that the collapse of the entire “state theory” agenda, which appeared poised to dominate the field of political science in the 1980s, can ultimately be traced to state theorists inability to demonstrate how democratic states achieve autonomy from the societies they govern. This shortcoming has lead some to conclude that no one has confirmed empirically the existence of political or social characteristics that allow governments to act autonomously. . . . As a result analyses tend to focus more on the policy outcomes themselves rather than on the state structure that is hypothesized to produce the outcome. (Barbara Geddes, Politician's Dilemma: Building State Capacity in Latin America [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994], 5–6) As a result, most state-centered studies assume that “the effectiveness of public officials . . . and thus their autonomy, very much hinges upon the state's internal features” (Nordlinger, “Taking the State Seriously,” 360). Given such assumptions, existing studies ignore the possibility that social divisions or variables, such as the ignorance of public opinion, can, in certain situations, grant the state autonomy from social constraint.

By focusing on the role of information, the diffusion of ideological belief systems, and the disjunctures between the ideas and information held by voters and elected officials, this approach deviates from both instrumental and structural Marxist approaches to examining state autonomy. Both approaches ultimately collapse into functionalist theorizing that do not meaningfully deviate from socially reductionist accounts of policy implementation. See Ralph Miliband, The State in Capitalist Society (New York: Basic Books, 1969); Nicos Poulantzas, “The Problem of the Capitalist State,” New Left Review 58 (1970): 67–78; Nicos Poulantzas, Political Power and Social Classes (London: New Left Books, 1973); Nicos Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism (London: New Left Books, 1978). The most compelling critique of the structuralist position is Axel Van den Berg, The Immanent Utopia: From Marxism on the State to the State of Marxism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988).

It should be noted that although currency inflation figured prominently in the election under examination, monetary policy could in no way be controlled by a governor. Although some might conclude that this illustrates the importance of economic issues during the period in question, an assertion which I would not necessarily challenge, this may actually underline the general symbolic nature of such elections.

See Lee Benson, Toward the Scientific Study of History, Selected Essays of Lee Benson (New York: J.B. Lippincott Publishing, 1972): 136–37. I examined both incoming and outgoing correspondence between a number of officials during the period immediately surrounding the Specie Resumption Act, the Ohio election, and the presidential conventions in 1876. Newspapers analyzed were located through newspaperarchive.com, a searchable, online database of historic newspapers. I conducted keyword and subject searches specifically focused on the Ohio election.

For the national banking system, see David Gische, “The New York City Banks and the Development of the National Banking System, 1860–1870,” American Journal of Legal History 23: (1979), 21–67; Bensel, Yankee Leviathan, chap. 4.

Melinda Lawson, Patriot Fires: Forging a New American Nationalism in the Civil War North (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002), chap. 2; Ellis Oberholtzer, Jay Cooke Financier of the Civil War (New York: Sentry Press, 1907).

For studies of financial policies during this period, see Irwin Unger, The Greenback Era: A Social and Political History of American Finance, 1865–1879 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1964); Robert Sharkey, Money, Class, and Party An Economic Study of Civil War and Reconstruction (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1959); Bensel, Yankee Leviathan, chaps. 4–5; Heather Cox Richardson, The Greatest Nation of the Earth: Republican Economic Polices During the Civil War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); Richard Timberlake, Monetary Policy in the United States: An Intellectual and Institutional History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); Allen Weinstein, Prelude to Populism: Origins of the Silver Issue, 1867–1878 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press); Laurence Laughlin, The History of Bimetallism in the United States (New York: Greenwood Press, 1968); Walter Nugent, The Money Question During Reconstruction (New York: W.W. Norton Company, 1967); Walter Nugent, Money and American Society 1865–1880 (New York: Free Press, 1968); Wesley Clair Mitchell, A History of the Greenbacks with Special Reference to the Economic Consequences of their Issue: 1862–65 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1903); Bray Hammond, Sovereignty and an Empty Purse: Banks and Politics in the Civil War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970); Don Carlos Barrett, The Greenbacks and Resumption of Specie Payments, 1862–1879 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931).

For a general overview of Republican economic programs, see Charles Calhoun, “Political Economy in the Gilded Era: The Republican Party's Industrial Policy,” Journal of Policy History 8 (1996): 291–309.

Sharkey, Money, Class, and Party, chap. 2.

Washington McLean, editor of the Cincinnati Enquirer, popularized the idea of paying the war debt in depreciated greenbacks as part of his effort to catapult his faction of Ohio Democrats back into national politics. McLean was originally an ardent “hard-money” Jacksonian Democrat, as was George Pendleton. Pendleton subsequently endorsed McLean's idea, coopting the issue from this competing faction of Ohio Democrats. See Chester McArthur Destler, American Radicalism, 1865–1901: Essays and Documents (New London: Connecticut College, 1946), chaps. 2–3; Max Shipley, “The Background and Legal Aspects of the Pendleton Plan,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 24 (1937): 329–40.

Irwin Unger, Greenback Era, chaps. 2–3; Bensel, Yankee Leviathan, 297; David Montgomery, Beyond Equality: Labor and the Radical Republicans, 1862–1872 (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1967). Stanley Coben, “Northeastern Business and Radical Reconstruction: A Re-examination,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 46 (1959): 78–84; Sharkey, Money, Class, and Party.

Popular opposition to specie resumption, especially in the Midwest, has been well documented in several studies. The most comprehensive treatment is Irwin Unger's magisterial Greenback Era, chaps. 2–3. See also Max L. Shipley, “The Background and Legal Aspects of the Pendleton Plan,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 24 (1937): 329–340; Sharkey, Money, Class, and Party, 85–91; Bensel, Yankee Leviathan, 254, 266, 275–80; William G. Carlton, “The Money Question in Indiana Politics 1865–1889,” Indiana Magazine of History 42 (1946): 107–50, William G. Carlton, “Why Was the Democratic Party in Indiana a Radical Party, 1865–1890?,” Indiana Magazine of History 42 (1946): 205–28; J. Cooke to H.D. Cooke, Philadelphia PA, 19 Sept. 1867; J. Cooke to H. Cooke, Philadelphia PA, 20 Sept. 1867, Jay Cooke Papers, Pennsylvania Historical Society (cited hereafter as Cooke Papers); Edward Atkinson to Hugh McCulloch, Boston MA, 7 Nov. 1867, Hugh McCulloch Papers, Library of Congress (cited hereafter as McCulloch Papers); G. Rathbore to H. McCulloch, 11 Dec. 1867, McCulloch Papers; A. Denny to J. Sherman, Eaton, OH, 14 Oct. 1867, John Sherman Papers, Library of Congress (cited hereafter as Sherman Papers); C. Davenport to J. Sherman, Barnesvill, OH, 15 Oct. 1867, Sherman Papers; A. Denny to B. Wade, Eaton, OH, July 1867; E. Ward to B. Wade, Detroit, MI, 13 Oct. 1867, Benjamin Wade Papers, Library of Congress.

R.M. Kelly to B. Bristow, Louisville, KY, 1874, Benjamin Bristow Papers, Library of Congress (cited hereafter as Bristow Papers). Along similar lines, one Democratic Ohio newspaper asked voters: You remember a year or two ago when money was more abundant you had good times in comparison to what they are now. Did you then think you had too much money? Well, in order that the Government might take care of the RICH and the rich take care of the Poor, the Republican leaders called in, or took out of circulation, millions of dollars of paper currency, and that is the reason money is so scarce, times so hard, prices so low and you are so hard pressed to get bread for yourselves and your families. (Defiance Democrat, Sept. 30, 1875)

Sharkey, Money, Class, and Party, 92–97; Unger, Greenback Era, 233–44; Sanders, Roots of Reform, 101–16.

Unger, Greenback Era, 250; Irwin Unger, “The Business Community and the Origins of the 1875 Resumption Act,” Business History Review 35 (1961): 252; Keith Polakoff, The Politics of Inertia: The Election of 1876 and the End of Reconstruction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973), 71; Clifford H. Moore, “Ohio in National Politics, 1865–1986,” Ohio Archaeological and Historical Publications 37 (1928): 294.

John Sherman, John Sherman's Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet (Chicago: Werner Company, 1896), 434; James G. Blaine, Twenty Years of Congress: From Lincoln to Garfield. With a Review of the Events Which Led to the Political Revolution of 1860 (Norwich: Henry Bill Publishing Company, 1886), 563, 565.

Sharkey, Money, Class, and Party, 86.

Hugh McCulloch, Men and Measures of Half a Century (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1889), 213.

This quote is in A.B. Nettleton to J. Cooke, Chicago, IL, 4 Sept. 1869, Cooke Papers.

J. Sherman to W.T. Sherman, St. Louis, MO., 20 Dec. 1868, in The Sherman Letters Correspondence between General and Senator Sherman From 1837 to 1891, ed. Rachel S. Thorndike (New York: Scribner's Sons, 1894); J. Sherman to J.W. Ellis, Washington DC, 10 June 1877, Sherman Papers.

Sherman, Recollections, 426; Garfield Diary, 10 Apr. 1874, Nov. 9, 1875, James A. Garfield Papers, Library of Congress (cited hereafter as Garfield Papers).

A.B. Nettleton to J. Cooke, Chicago, IL, 4 Sept. 1869, J. Cooke Papers.

Report of the Special Committee, New York Chamber of Commerce, 28 Nov. 1873, in Annual Report of the Corporation of the Corporation of the Chamber of Commerce, of the State of New-York, for the Year 1873–'74, 87–88.

B. Bristow to J. Sherman, Washington DC, 27 Aug. 1875, B. Bristow to Horace Maynard, Washington DC, 25 Sept. 1875, Bristow Papers. The Republican defeat in 1874 was probably driven by voters' negative “sociotropic” evaluations of national economic performance. See Donald Kinder and Roderick Kiewiet, “Economic Discontent and Political Behavior: The Role of Personal Grievances and Collective Economic Judgments in Congressional Voting,” American Journal of Political Science 23 (1979): 495–527; Donald Kinder and Roderick Kiewiet, “Sociotropic Politics: The American Case,” British Journal of Political Science 11 (1981): 129–61.

Annual Report of the Secretary of the Treasury, 1874, 11.

Ibid., 12.

Ibid., 14–16, 22.

Garfield Diary, 8 Dec. 1874, Garfield Papers; Unger, Greenback Era, 252.

Garfield Diary, 8 Dec. 1874, Garfield Papers; Sherman, Recollections, 509.

As early as 12 December, Garfield reported having a “long interview with Secretary Bristow in reference to a bill for specie payments” (Garfield Diary, 12 Dec. 1874, Garfield Papers).

Fractional greenbacks were small denomination greenback notes. For discussions of the Specie Resumption Act see Weinstein, Prelude to Populism, 41–48. Unger, Greenback Era, 249–60. Although the Resumption Act included a free-banking clause at the insistence of John Logan of Illinois, presumably to placate his inflationary constituents, those close to the proceedings dismissed the clauses' relevance noting that “the amendment in the Sixth Section, making free banking after 6 mos. from the passage of the act is in deference to a supposed popular wish, harmless, and . . . is expedient” (B.T. Nourse to B. Bristow, Washington DC, 15 Dec. 1874, Bristow Papers).

See generally, Charles and Mary Beard, The Rise of American Civilization (London: Jonathan Cape, 1927); Howard Beale, The Critical Year, 1866: A Study of Andrew Johnson and Reconstruction (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1930).

Unger, “Business Community,” 247–62.

Commercial and Financial Chronicle, 7 Nov. 1874.

Congressional Record, 43rd Cong., 2 Sess., 1875, 187. Stevenson indicated that the business community remained divided in their financial views since “the long debate that we had last year shows how business men differ in regard to what the exact needs of the country are in relation to a system of finance,” and complained that he could not “vote now knowingly on this bill; and if you were to force me to vote to-day I should not exactly know how to vote. I have not had time either to consider it or to know its probable operation” (ibid.).

Ibid., 188.

Ibid., 204.

Commercial and Financial Chronicle, 16 Jan. 1875.

Sherman, Recollections, 433.

Clipping in George McCartee to B. Bristow, 9 Dec. 1874, Bristow Papers.

Unger, “Business Community,” 248; Commercial and Financial Chronicle, 2 Jan. 1875.

Financier 8 (27 Nov. 1875), 358–59, cited in Unger, “Business Community,” 261.

Ibid., 248.

Unger, Greenback Era, 255.

Ibid., 275; J. Smith to J. Sherman, Ashland OH, 6 Aug. 1875, Sherman Papers; William Sweet to R. Hayes, Washington DC, 25 June 1875, Rutherford B. Hayes Papers, Hayes Memorial Library, Fremont, OH (cited hereafter as Hayes Papers).

Hayes Diary, 18 Apr. 1875, in Diary and Letters of Rutherford Birchard Hayes, Nineteenth President of the United States. Volume III 1865–1881, ed. Charles Williams (Columbus: Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Society, 1924).

Diary, 31 May 1875, in Diary and Letters of Rutherford Birchard Hayes.

Ward McAfee, Religion, Race, and Reconstruction: The Public School in the Politics of the 1870s (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 178.

G.E. Howe to R. Hayes, Lancaster, OH, 13 May 1875; W. Knapp to R. Hayes, Massillon, OH, 25 May 1875; Isaac Newton to R. Hayes, Renton, OH, 27 May 1875, Hayes Papers.

R. Hayes to J. Garfield, Fremont OH, 28 June 1875, in Diary and Letters of Rutherford Birchard Hayes. Democrats echoed this conclusion noting that “a portion of the Germans and a few others, complain of the financial plank in the platform, but with the masses it has positive strength” (G.W. Morgan to W. Allen, 4 July 1875, Cleveland, OH, William Allen Papers, Library of Congress [cited hereafter as Allen Papers]). It is worth noting that the groups that most concerned Republicans – debtors, farmers, miners, and laborers working in manufacturing industries – are precisely those that state-centered political economists claim voted on economic issues and divisions. It is important to recognize that these groups were clearly influenced by economic considerations and were opposed to the Republicans' financial policies specifically on economic grounds.

R. Hayes to J. Sherman, Fremont, Ohio, 29 June 1875, in Diary and Letters of Rutherford Birchard Hayes.

R. Hayes to J. Sherman, Fremont Ohio, 5 July 1875, in ibid. Hayes hardly endorsed the wisdom of public opinion. Commenting on elected official's positions on public schooling, Hayes noted: I recognize fully the evil of rule by ignorance. I see enough of it under my own eyes. You are not so much worse off in this respect than New York, Chicago, and other cities having a large uneducated population. But the remedy is not, I am sure, to be found in the abandonment of the American principle that all must share in government. The whites of the South must do as we do, forget to drive and learn to lead the ignorant masses around them. (Ibid., 263) Elsewhere, Hayes noted in his diary that “Winthrop says something like this: Each one of us is engaged in the formation of public opinion. Each of us is in some degree responsible for its course and character. ‘Opportunity, powers, and employment of them'” (Hayes Diary, 21 Apr. 1878, ibid.). Hayes's recognition of the ignorance of public opinion actually led him to restrain certain Republican bureaucratic appointees from participating in election contests. This was an effort to prevent elite domination of the policy process, and to ensure that “office holders shall not run the people, but allow political ideas and movements to spring from the people instead of from those in office” (see J. Sherman to S. Arnold, Washington DC, 14 June 1877, Sherman Papers).

Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution 1863–1877 (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), 557; Unger, Greenback Era, 275; William A. Clonts, “The Political Campaign of 1875 in Ohio,” Ohio Archeological and Historical Society Publications 31 (1922): 38–97; C.E. Henry to J.A. Garfield, 21 Dec. 1874, Pond, OH, in Politics and Patronage in the Gilded Age; the Correspondence of James A. Garfield and Charles E. Henry, ed. James D. Norris and Arthur H. Shaffer (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1970).

Ross Web, Benjamin Helm Bristow, Border State Politician (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1969), 186.

Economic conditions had deteriorated in Ohio, with declining wage levels exceeding the general declines in the price level. Additionally, between 1873 and 1878, half of Ohio's blast furnaces closed. Wage declines, over 33 percent in some instances, combined with the return of wage payments in company script, increased economic pressures on workers in iron and steel manufacturing. From 1873 to 1875 there was a 20 percent decline in the wages of common laborers, and a 19 percent decline in the wages of blacksmiths employed in iron industries. These statistics were compiled from the United States Census Bureau of the Census, Tenth Census of the United States: 1880, Report on the Statistics of Wages in Manufacturing Industries, 121–22, 131. Wage rates were computed from the Struthers Iron Company, the Himrod Furnace Company, and the Hecla Iron and Mining Company in Struthers, Youngstown, and Ironton respectively. See Clonts, Political Campaign of 1875, 41–46; Reginald McGrane, “Ohio and the Greenback Movement,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 11 (1925): 532.

Peter T. Luther to John Stoll, 10 Nov. 1875, John Stoll Papers, Indiana State Library, Indianapolis; A. Warner to T. Ewing, Marrietta, OH, 22 Aug. 1875, Ewing Family Papers, Library of Congress.

The Ohio Democrat, 19 Aug. 1875.

Sherman, Recollections, 435.

A.L. Gilstrap to Carl Schurz, Macon, MO, 1874, Carl Schurz Papers, Library of Congress.

A. Campbell to T. Ewing, La Salle, June 14, 1875, Ewing Family Papers, Library of Congress.

Ibid.

J. Smith to J. Sherman, Ashland, OH, 6 Aug. 1875, Sherman Papers.

Ibid.

G.W. Morgan to W. Allen, Cleveland, OH, 4 July 1875, Allen Papers.

C.W. Woolley to Manton Marble, Kelly's Island, OH, 1 Sept. 1875, Marble Papers.

Hayes to Wikoff, Youngstown, OH, 20 Sept. 1875, Hayes Letters.

H. Rawson to R.B. Hayes, Heartland, OH, 5 Sept. 1875, Hayes Papers.

H.S. Bundy to R. Hayes, Wellstow, OH, 2 June 1875, Hayes Papers.

See T. Ewing to Hon Senator Reese, Lancaster, OH, 22 Mar. 1875; T. Ewing to Gen. Charles [?], Lancaster, OH, 21 Mar. 1875; Ewing Family Papers, Library of Congress. I am grateful for James Gutowski for helpful suggestions regarding Geghan.

R.M. Stimson to R. Hayes, Marietta, OH, 14 June 1875, Hayes Papers. The Steubenville Daily Herald & News noted that “there has been less fault found with the famous Geghan bill itself . . . than the means which were used to secure its enactment into a law.” Letters were printed demonstrating that Catholics were demanding the Democrats pass the bill; see, for example, Steubenville Daily Herald & News, 14 June 1875.

Daniel Porter, “Governor Rutherford B. Hayes,” Ohio History 77 (1968): 71.

Richard J. Carwardine, Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993); Richard J. Carwardine, “Methodists, Politics, and the Coming of the American Civil War,” Church History 69 (2000): 578–609; Ronald Formisano, The Birth of Mass Political Parties, Michigan, 1827–1861 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971); Ronald Formisano, The Transformation of Political Culture: Massachusetts Parties, 1790s–1840s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983); Lee Benson, The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy: New York as a Test Case (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1961); Michael Holt, Forging a Majority: The Formation of the Republican Party in Pittsburgh, 1848–1860 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1969); Richard Jensen, The Winning of the Midwest, Social and Political Conflict 1888–1896 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971); Paul Kleppner, The Cross of Culture: A Social Analysis of Midwestern Politics 1850–1900 (New York: Free Press, 1970); Paul Kleppner, The Third Electoral System, 1853–1892, Parties, Voters and Political Cultures (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979); Richard Oestreicher, “Urban Working-Class Political Behavior and Theories of American Electoral Politics, 1870–1940,” Journal of American History 74 (1988): 1257–86; Daniel W. Howe, “The Evangelical Movement and Political Culture in the North During the Second Party System,” Journal of American History 77 (1991): 1216–39.

One newspaper suggested: “The only sure way to defeat those who would destroy our schools, is to defeat the party through whose servility they expected to gain their point” (The Elyria Independent Democrat, 19 May 1875). For the role of liked and disliked groups in the formation of political attitudes, see Arthur Lupia, “Shortcuts Versus Encyclopedias: Information and Voting Behavior in California Insurance Reform Elections,” American Political Science Review 88 (1994): 63–76; Paul Sniderman, Richard A. Brody, and Philip E. Tetlock, Reasoning and Choice: Explorations in Political Psychology (New York: Cambridge University Press 1991); Samuel Popkin, The Reasoning Voter: Communication and Persuasion in Presidential Campaigns (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1991); John Zaller, The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

Appletons' Annual Cyclopaedia and Register of Important Events of the Year 1875 (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1875), 606.

Ibid.

R.M. Stimson to R. Hayes, Marietta, OH, 14 June 1875, Hayes Papers. If the election centered on religious animosity, the question arrises as to why these additional planks were included at all. It is possible that they were intended to attract specific electoral groups to the Republican Party. However, since most Republican voters do not appear to have been aware that the election centered on issues other than the Geghan law, it is possible that these planks were not intended for popular electoral consumption, but rather reflect the compromises struck between the elites struggling to control the Republican Party machinery. Indeed, since party factions often “bolted” on the basis of disagreement over economic issues, it is likely that the platform reflects the compromises among Ohio Republicans necessary for unification among these elites. See generally Bensel, Political Economy.

The Athens Messenger, 30 Sept. 1875.

Hayes Diary, 3 June 1875, in Diary and Letters of Rutherford Birchard Hayes.

R. Hayes to J. Garfield, Fremont Ohio, 28 June 1875, in Diary and Letters of Rutherford Birchard Hayes.

The actual bill reads: The Geghan Bill, A Bill to secure liberty of conscience in matters of religion to persons imprisoned or detained by authority of law. Sec.1. Be it enacted by the General Assembly of the State of Ohio. That, as liberty of conscience is not forfeited by reason of conviction of crime, or by reason of detention in any penal, reformatory or eleemosynary institution, or any House of Refuge, Work-house, jail or public asylum of the State, no person in any such institution shall be compelled to attend religious worship or instruction of a form which is against the dictates of his or her conscience; and it shall be the duty of every Director, Trustee, Superintendent or other person having in charge any such institution to furnish equal facilities to all such persons for receiving the ministrations of the authorized clergyman of their own religious denomination or persuasion, under such reasonable rules and regulations as the Trustees, Directors, Managers or Superintendents shall make; but no such rules shall be construed as to prevent the clergyman of any denomination from fully administering the rights of his denomination to such inmates, provided such ministrations entail no expense on the public treasury. Sec. 2. This act shall take effect from and after its passage. (Qtd. in Appletons' Annual 1875, 605. See also The Ohio Democrat, 16 Sept. 1875)

The Ohio Democrat, 10 Feb. 1876, The Portsmouth Times, 21 Aug. 1875.

Appletons' Annual 1875, 607; The Cambridge Jeffersonian, 9 Sept. 1875.

Appletons' Annual 1875, 607.

Qtd. in The Ohio Democrat, 9 Sept. 1875.

The Ohio Democrat, 16 Sept. 1875.

The Ohio Democrat, 10 Feb. 1876.

Geghan reportedly granted the interview only “after forcibly ejecting a tablespoonful of amber colored saliva” after which “he remarked: ‘Well, my old boy, my little bill raised hell in the State, didn't it'?” (The Athens Messenger, 2 Sept. 1875).

The Coshocton Age, 28 May 1875; The Elyria Republican, 25 Sept. 1875.

Unlike the “American Lutheran” movement, which drew its theological positions from Lutheran pietists such as Franke and Spener, the Ohio Lutheran Synod was lead by such conservative theologians as Matthias Loy, who rejected the pietists' evangelism. Many Ohio Lutherans supported slavery and expressed hostility to the Republican Party, precluding Lutherans in Ohio from homogeneously supporting the Republican Party as they did in areas where the pietistic Lutherans dominated. See Charles William Heathcote, The Lutheran Church and the Civil War (New York: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1919), 82; C. George Fry, “Matthias Loy, Leader of Ohio's Lutherans, Ohio History 76 (1967): 198–99; Paul Kuenning, The Rise and Fall of American Lutheran Pietism (Macon: Mercer University Press, 1988); 58, 134; Paul Kleppner, The Cross of Culture a Social Analysis of Midwestern Politics 1850–1900 (New York: Free Press), 43–51.

Qtd. in Frederic Bancroft and William Dunning eds., The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz, 3 vols. (New York: The McClure Company, 1908), 363.

For an interesting discussion of electoral volatility on cultural issues, see John Gerring, “Culture versus Economics: An American Dilemma,” Social Science History 23 (1999): 129–73.

C.E. Henry to J.A. Garfield, Pond, OH, 17 Apr. 1875, in Politics and Patronage in the Gilded Age. Despite such uncertainty, Henry noted: “the republicans are pretty sure of the German vote in '76 as matters stand now” (ibid.).

Thomas Hubbard to R. Hayes, New Vienna, OH, 12 June 1875, Hayes Papers.

W. McKinley to R. Hayes, Canton, OH, 8 June 1875, Hayes Papers.

W.C. McFarland to R. Hayes, Cleveland, OH, 25 June 1875, Hayes Papers.

R. Hayes to A.T. Wikoff, Fremont, OH, 8 July 1875, in Diary and Letters of Rutherford Birchard Hayes.

C.E. Henry to J.A. Garfield, Pond, OH, 25 July 1875, Garfield Henry Correspondence; G.B. Smith to R.B. Hayes, Elkader Iowa, 12 Aug. 1875, Hayes Papers.

H.O. Sheldon to R. Hayes, Oberlin, OH, 5 July 1875, Hayes Papers.

Thomas Wildes to R. Hayes, Akron, OH, 8 June 1875, Hayes Papers.

C. H [?] to R. Hayes, Pomeroy, OH, 8 June 1875, Hayes Papers, J. Smith to J. Sherman, Oakland, OH, 18 Oct. 1875, Sherman Papers.

A.T. Wikoff to R.B. Hayes, Columbus, OH, 6 Aug. 1875, Hayes Papers.

R. Hayes to W. Bickham, Fremont, OH, 10 July 1875, in Diary and Letters of Rutherford Birchard Hayes; E.E. Henry to R.B. Hayes, Geanga Lake, OH, Sept. 1875, Hayes Papers.

Hayes himself exhibited considerable paranoia regarding Catholics. When a proposal for appropriating funds for a public library was put before Ohio voters, Hayes noted that “it is said the Catholics opposed [the funding of the library] because they hate libraries [and] it is conjectured that the enemy to be feared is the Catholic influence” (Hayes Diary, 13 Sept. 1873, in Diary and Letters of Rutherford Birchard Hayes). Late in the 1866 election, Hayes noted “the negro prejudice is still very strong among the Irish, and people of Irish parentage, and the ignorant and unthinking generally” (R. Hayes to S. Birchard, Cincinnati, 6 Oct. 1866, in Diary and Letters of Rutherford Birchard Hayes).

R. Hayes to W. Bickham, Fremont, Ohio, 10 July 1875, in ibid.

Unger, Greenback Era, 286.

J. Smith to J. Sherman, Oakland, OH, Oct. 18, 1875, Sherman Papers. Sherman scrawled across the back of this letter: “please read . . . this letter . . . in which I heartily concur.”

Halstead to M. Marble, 12 Oct. 1875, Marble Papers.

George W. Morgan to William Allen, 16 Oct. 1875, Allen Papers.

Ralph Morrow, Northern Methodism and Reconstruction (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1956), 217–8.

Morrow, Northern Methodism, 217–18.

Ibid., 218; F. Fonton [?] to M. Marble, New York, NY, 8 Dec. 1875, Marble Papers.

Republicans aware of the campaigns tactics in the Ohio election reported persistent public opposition to resumption, concluding: “In looking over the results of this fall elections I do not share in the general belief that the inflation doctrines are overthrown.” Garfield Diary, 3 Nov. 1875, Garfield Papers.

J. Buchanan Henry to S. Tilden, New York, NY, 23[?] Nov. 1875, Samuel Tilden Papers, New York Public Library, New York (cited hereafter as Tilden Papers).

B. Bristow to Judge D.M. Wooldridge, Washington DC, 11 Oct. 1875, Bristow Papers; Amsa Walker to Manton Marble, North Brookfield, [NY]?, 18 Sept. 1875, Marble Papers.

Keith Polakoff, The Politics of Inertia, The Election of 1876 and the End of Reconstruction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973), 90.

Roy Morris, Fraud of the Century: Rutherford B. Hayes, Samuel Tilden, and the Stolen Election of 1876 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003), 113–14.

Manton Marble to [?] Aug. 1875, Marble Papers.

For example, one Southerner noted: The questions of currency, tariff, navigation and reciprocity laws, cheap transportation are all questions of the highest import, for they involve the case comfort material prosperity of the country – but to rescue the government from Republican control involves the very salvation of our Republican Institutions. (Bassett Frech to S. Tilden, Whitley, VA, 21 Nov. 1875, Tilden Papers)

The endorsement was opposed by laborers and inflationists in the South and Midwest. See Unger, Greenback Era, 308–10; William Wallace to S. Tilden, Washington DC, 7 July 1876; A. Hewitt to S. Tilden, Washington, DC, 6 July 1876; L. De La Court to S. Tilden, Hamilton, OH, 6 July 1876; T.A. Hendricks to S. Tilden, Indianapolis, IN, 6 July 1874, Tilden Papers. The Democratic endorsement of resumption was not straightforward, and the language of the St. Louis platform was so vague that Hendricks could conclude that the platform actually rejected resumption. Conversely, one Ohio Democrat claimed the Democrats platform criticized the Resumption Act for not clearly specifying how to accomplish resumption before 1879. See Robert Minturn to S. Tilden, New Brighton, NY, 3 July 1876, Tilden Papers.

Annual Cyclopedia for 1876, 785; Unger, Greenback Era, 309.

G. Curtis to S. Tilden, New York, NY, 10 July 1876, Tilden Papers.

David Wells to S. Tilden, 9 Nov. 1875, Tilden Papers. Tilden fully appreciated the extent of elite influence over public opinion. Tilden was reportedly attracted to the Democrats specifically because “the opinion of its great masses could be more easily shaped and molded by the mere force of ideas” (Morris, Fraud of the Century, 86). See also Nancy Cohen, The Reconstruction of American Liberalism, 1865–1914 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).

A letter Manton Marble forwarded to Tilden noted: It is very evident to me, and to you more so I presume, that the Republicans will not be scrupulous in the use of means to carry the next Presidential election. They will use the school question in every form they can present it. It has occurred to me that it will be well for Gov. Tilden in his message to so refer to the schools and system of this state as to place him right. (J.M. to “dear Son,” Bedford, 21 Nov. 1875, Tilden Papers)

Polakoff, Politics of Inertia, 44–52. In a letter discussing the potential Republican nominees for 1876, E.H. Henry noted: Hayes is looming up far ahead of Blaine for the Presidency. A recent objection to Blain is that he cannot be trusted on the Catholic question, as he was early trained in that faith. I have heard this several times in Penn and Ohio. (E.H. Henry to J.A. Garfield, Geauga Lake, Ohio, Jan. 22, 1876, Garfield-Henry Correspondence)

William Rehnquist, Centennial Crisis: The Disputed Election of 1876 (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2004), 47.

Clifford H. Moore, “Ohio in National Politics,” 294; Sherman, Recollections, 453–55.

J. Sherman to A.M. Burns, n.d., n.p., Sherman Papers.

Unger, Greenback Era, 286.

F.A. Hayek, The Counter-Revolution of Science, Studies in the Abuse of Reason (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1979), 138.

The extent of voter ignorance of democratic politics is simply shocking to those not familiar with this specialized branch of research. Contemporary studies indicate that the overwhelming majority of voters are literally completely unaware of the vast majority of what the democratic state is doing. For example, a full 70 percent of the American public cannot name both their Senators. When only 10 percent of the electorate can name a single policy implemented by their Congressional representative, and when 70 percent of the American public cannot describe the nature of Roe vs. Wade, one wonders how even well-meaning elected officials could represent social demands on regulatory issues that reach a certain minimal degree of complexity. See Michael Delli Carpini and Scott Keeter, What Americans Know about Politics and Why it Matters (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 71; Barbara Hinckley, “The American Voter in Congressional Elections,” American Political Science Review 74 (1980): 644; Larry Bartels, “Uninformed Votes: Information Effects in Presidential Elections,” American Journal of Political Science 40 (1996): 194–230.