Hail to the Chief - President Samuel Tilden

Well, just how different would our world be if the 19th President of the United States had been Samuel Tilden and not Rutherford B. Hayes in 1877-1881.

And what if Tilden had accepted the Democratic nomination, which was handed to him, but he turned down, in 1880.

Just who was Tilden, and what kind of President would he have been?

This seems, in part, more a question for the GQ forum. 'Round here we just argue about why Tilden wasn’t President. (Though no one has, as yet, offered a critique of the C. Vann Woodward theory I posted a while back.)

One of the best alternate worlds science fiction stories is based on what might have happened if Tilden had won the election of 1876.

Of course, he couldn’t have, because the decision was based on the electoral votes of Florida and two other states, and he was a Democrat.

“Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” - some great historian, IIRC Toynbee

Well, let’s see…

Prior to the Hayes election, the Republican Party was the party of Southern Reconstruction. They sold out the blacks in the south to get their man into office. Had they not done so, and the deal not gone through, Tilden might have won the election. Let us suppose such was the case.

Tilden, Democrat, would have undone Reconstruction himself, assuming the probable support of Congress.

Fast forward to the next Republican victory, assuming a pro-Reconstruction-sentiment Republican party would draw votes. Republicans are associated with civil rights initiatives and fairness to a greater extent in this parallel universe than in the one we inhabit. The suffragists, who allied themselves with the cause of anti-slavery and, later, black voting and other citizen rights, would have been more likely to see the Republican party as their natural ally. (Actually many of them did anyway, but let us say “more so” under these circumstances). The Democratic party, a populist party of more socially conservative tendencies than the one in our world, would have become so if only as a result of polarization as the Republicans attracted the idealistic social revolutionary types.

By the 1960s, would the Republicans have been a party of economic conservaties and societal egalitarians? Would the Democrats have been a 1960s version of the Know-Nothings, or perhaps of George Wallace’s American Independence Party? Who knows…too many different strands in the intervening years, you would by then be talking about 100 years since President Tilden. World War I, II, even the Spanish-American War, might have been experienced by America in totally different ways (or not at all).