Near the end
of his second term, Grant began hinting that he would be open to a third. An anti-Catholic Methodist bishop, Gilbert
Haven (1821-1880), made a speech in Boston in which he declared that Grant, a
fellow-Methodist, was “the only man who could conquer their enemies.”[1] The Boston
Herald, evidently more cognizant of the growing power of the Catholic
Church, and fully aware that the Catholic vote had handed Grant his second
term, cautioned the president against running on an anti-Catholic platform.
 |
| Hayes: Better anti-Catholic credentials than Grant. |
All but
assured that the electorate, Catholic, Protestant, Jew, or atheist, would not
be able to stomach Grant for a third term, the Republicans put forward
Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822-1893).
Hayes’s anti-Catholic credentials were far superior to those of Grant,
tainted as the latter’s were with political expedience.
Hayes agreed
to accept the nomination on condition that the Party not “let the Catholic
question drop out of sight.”[2] He was selected in the June 1876 convention
as a compromise candidate on the seventh ballot. Included in the official platform of the Party
was a plank declaring that the public school system was the bulwark of the
nation and recommending the adoption of a constitutional amendment prohibiting
aid to any institution under the control of a religious organization.[3]
The Democrats
believed Hayes’s nomination gave them the best chance of victory they had
enjoyed for many years. They nominated
Samuel Jones Tilden (1814-1886), the governor of New York, whose landslide win
two years before had put him at the top of the list of Democratic presidential
hopefuls. To allay fears that the Party
was taking orders from the Vatican, the Democrats adopted a resolution in
support of the public school system with Tilden’s approval.
 |
| Samuel J. Tilden, President ... or nearly. |
Despite the
Democrats’ efforts to distance the Party from the Catholic question, the
Republicans took every opportunity to stir up anti-Catholic sentiment. Pamphlets were circulated throughout the
country alleging that Church leaders were ordering the faithful to vote for
Tilden under penalty of sin. When the
House of Representatives, controlled by the Democrats, passed a diluted and
unenforceable version of the Blaine Amendment that seemed to open the door to
government aid to church schools, Hayes denounced it as “Jesuitical.”[4]
When the
results of the election were tallied, the Republican New York Tribune declared Tilden the winner by a narrow
margin. He had swept the South and won
states in the North that the Republicans had assumed were in Hayes’s
pocket. Tilden very nearly defeated
Hayes in Hayes’s home state of Ohio.
The Republicans
challenged the results in Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina. After four months of recounting votes and
cutting deals with southern Democrats to accept the recalculations,
Republican-appointed election commissions announced that Hayes, not Tilden, was
the winner in the recounted states.
 |
| James Cardinal Gibbons |
The decision
was handed over to Congress. After
receiving Republican promises to end Reconstruction, withdraw occupation
troops, and spend millions rebuilding infrastructure, southern Democrats
decided in favor of Hayes. After debates
lasting eighteen hours, Hayes was declared the winner at 4:00 a.m. on March 4,
1877 by a single electoral vote.
Possibly in
part to counter the growing anti-Catholic hysteria, James Cardinal Gibbons (1834-1921)
wrote his bestselling Faith of Our
Fathers, published in late 1876.
Directed to explaining the Catholic Church to Protestants, the book may
have helped calm some of the frenzy stirred up by the campaign, and possibly
prevented Hayes from carrying out his program, although nativist agitation
against aid to Catholic schools was to continue down to the present day.
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