The erstwhile governor of New York, Cleveland was the most successful member of a cohort, dubbed the “Bourbon Democrats” by their Republican enemies. The critics intended the name to suggest Southern sympathies and counter-revolutionary pieties. The Bourbons were a curious coalition of New Yorkers and Southerners. They saved the Democratic Party—and American conservatism—in the years immediately after the Civil War. Defenders of states’ rights, republican liberty, and economic temperance, they opposed military Reconstruction, direct democracy, and redistributive measures.
Unsurprisingly, they have been slandered as reactionary racists for their opposition to plans like those of Grant and Sherman to transform the South. The Bourbons were the reputed heirs to the notorious “Doughfaces,” those Northern Democrats like Buchanan and Pierce who tried to be judicious in handling the sectional crises of the 1840s and ‘50s. Despite all this maligning, they were remarkably successful at winning the support of voters and protecting the tradition of American conservatism in what Kirk might have called a “rear guard action.”
Yet if Cleveland’s initial success was only a rear guard action, it was also a tactical masterstroke. He shattered the Tammany Hall machine, so long a pernicious influence in American politics, and routed William Jennings Bryan’s populist offensive. In doing so, he united the Northern and Southern halves of the Democratic Party while also drawing support from the anti-corruption “Mugwumps” of the GOP. His election in 1884, against the corrupt, anti-Catholic James G. Blaine, brought a temperate, conservative, and honest politician to the White House.
Cleveland stood on the shoulders of honorable and prudent men, his Bourbon antecedents, who had chipped away at the Republican domination of American politics. The most accomplished among them was Samuel J. Tilden, once governor of New York. Tilden is best remembered for his defeat in 1876 and as the victim of one of the most corrupt bargains ever perpetrated in American electoral history. He remains the only candidate to have ever won an outright majority of the popular vote—50.9 percent to opponent Hayes’s 47.9 percent—and still lose the Electoral College.
Tilden lost the Electoral College by a single vote, his 184 to Hayes’ 185, and that outcome was the result of 20 disputed electoral votes. Of those, Tilden need to win only a single vote to win the election, but he lost all of them. In Florida, South Carolina, and Louisiana, three disputed states, statewide returns had Tilden victorious; however, the Republican-dominated state electoral commissions rejected enough Democratic votes to secure their states for Hayes.
At the end of months of legal challenges and legislative injunctions, Democratic leaders capitulated to achieve the withdrawal of federal troops from South Carolina and Louisiana, the last two states under occupation. Tilden, the leader of his party, became little more than a bargaining chip in Reconstruction-era power politics.