Adam Fairclough. Bulldozed and Betrayed: Louisiana and the Stolen Elections of 1876.

Late nineteenth-century American elections have a deserved reputation for corruption and fraud, but the elections in Louisiana stand apart. They did not merely hinge on the accumulated votes but rather on who counted them, how those counts were interpreted, and who was violently prevented from voting. The results of the elections had a profound impact on individuals and the nation. At the local level, white supremacist groups terrorized Black residents through intimidation, assaults, and murder, to sway the vote. At a national level, in 1876, the presidency lay in the balance because Louisiana was one of three states with disputed electoral returns. Adam Fairclough takes up this complicated and consequential history in Bulldozed and Betrayed.

Fairclough has written two other books on Louisiana history. His 2018 book, The Revolution That Failed: Reconstruction in Natchitoches, focused on Reconstruction, but it is quite different from the book under review here. The earlier book is a case study of a town, whereas Bulldozed and Betrayed is national in scope. The former book presents a controversial argument about the meaning of Reconstruction, while Fairclough’s most recent book is largely narrative driven. It tells the story of the Potter Committee, a congressional body that investigated allegations of Republican Party fraud in the Louisiana election of 1876.

Deeply versed in newspaper coverage, congressional investigations, and the papers of leading politicians, Fairclough tells a captivating story about “the nitty-gritty of Gilded Age politics” (6). It is a book filled with unsavory characters and politically ambitious individuals. Some sought fortune from political appointments and did not care much about which side paid their salaries or bribes. But amid a widespread culture of political corruption, a few honorable individuals stood out. One was Eliza Pinkston, a Black Republican sharecropper, who risked her life to testify about Democratic bulldozing, which was the term used in Louisiana to refer to the coordinated campaign of threats and violence to suppress the Republican vote. A group of white men attacked her home, murdered her husband and baby, and left her for dead, with gunshot and knife wounds. Her testimony became a journalistic sensation, one that cut through the partisan bickering.

To direct attention away from the bulldozing and to attack the new Rutherford B. Hayes administration, congressional Democrats created the Potter Committee. They hoped to embarrass President Hayes by exposing Republican corruption. Instead, the witnesses that the Democrats produced proved to be so dishonest that the committee ended up exposing unprecedented levels of Democratic corruption. From East and West Feliciana parishes, where the initial allegations were made, to presidential candidate Samuel Tilden’s campaign headquarters in New York City, Democrats employed all manner of strategies to steal the election. Republican newspapers piled on during the committee hearings by decoding cipher telegrams that showed top Democratic Party officials offering substantial bribes to state Returning Board members in Louisiana, Florida, and South Carolina, the three states that were at the center of the electoral commission that ultimately gave the presidency to Hayes.

While Democratic corruption was on full display, Republicans did not emerge from the Potter Committee unscathed. Fairclough excoriates President Hayes for carrying out “one of the most brutal acts of political surgery in American history” (260). The Louisiana Returning Board threw out the votes in five bulldozed parishes. This gave the Republican gubernatorial nominee, Stephen B. Packard, enough votes to claim the governor’s office, but it left Hayes short of the votes needed to claim Louisiana’s electoral vote. So, the Returning Board manipulated the vote counts in other parishes to boost Hayes’s total. Meanwhile, close allies of Hayes met secretly with Louisiana Democrats to craft an infamous bargain. Congressional Democrats would not oppose Hayes taking the White House if he removed the US soldiers that were protecting Packard and the Republican-majority legislature from the White League paramilitary forces. In other words, Hayes betrayed Louisiana Republicans.

Fairclough makes a strong case that “Hayes’s accession” was “a turning point in American history” (8), one that caused “irreversible” (9) damage by ignoring massive electoral violence and facilitating the rise of Jim Crow. This interpretation of the Compromise of 1877, however, is broadly accepted in the field. Rather than staking out new interpretive ground, Fairclough focuses on telling the story of the Potter Committee. As a result, topics that loomed large at the time seem peripheral in hindsight. Fairclough reproduces the extensive investigation into the existence of a letter that purportedly promised federal appointments to low-level Louisiana politicians. The letter, however, turned out to be a fake and of little importance. Other controversial episodes surfaced, and the newspapers faithfully reported the spectacle. The effect, although perhaps unintended, is to show how Gilded Age audiences often ignored the problems of white supremacist violence and instead indulged in heated exchanges between cantankerous congressmen and venal witnesses. Put another way, Fairclough missed an opportunity to weigh in on debates related to postwar reconciliation, the quality of democratic governance, and the relationship between violence and elections.

Nevertheless, scholars of Reconstruction and Gilded Age politics will appreciate this account as a well-written and composed history of a turbulent moment in a divisive era.