Centennial Crisis The Disputed Election of 1876

Chapter 1 On May 10, 1876, the Centennial Exhibition, commemorating one hundred years of American independence, opened in Philadelphia-the logical place to hold such an exhibition. It was there on July 4, 1776, that the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence, proclaiming in Thomas Jefferson's stirring words that "these united colonies are, and of Right ought to be, Free and Independent States." Philadelphia in 1776 was not only the seat of the rudimentary national government, but also the largest city in the country. After the ratification of the Constitution in 1789, Philadelphia became the temporary capital of the infant nation, but in 1800 lost out to the new city of Washington as the site of the permanent seat of government. In time New York overtook Philadelphia as the most populous city, and both New York and Boston became more prominent centers of commerce on the East Coast. But Philadelphia rose to the occasion in 1876. Two hundred buildings were constructed in Fairmount Park, and on opening day more than 186,000 people visited the grounds. Many foreign nations took buildings to exhibit their cultures and accomplishments. Fukui Makota, the Japanese commissioner to the exposition, observed: The first day crowds come like sheep, run here, run there, run everywhere. One man start, one thousand follow. Nobody can see anything, nobody can do anything. All rush, push, tear, shout, make plenty noise, say damn great many times, get very tired, and go home. When the exhibition closed six months later, it had been visited by more than 10 million people. It was truly the first man-made tourist mecca in the United States. Much had changed in the first century of America's existence. In the eighteenth century, travel by land was either on foot or horseback, or in a vehicle drawn by horse or oxen. Travel by water was accomplished by sailing vessels. But in 1806, Robert Fulton invented the steamboat, and by 1830 the first railroads were being built in the United States. Transportation was revolutionized. Samuel F. B. Morse invented the telegraph in 1843; Cyrus McCormick followed with the mechanical reaper, and Elias Howe with the sewing machine. In 1869 the transcontinental railroad was completed with the driving of the Golden Spike at Promontory Point, Utah. And in the very year of the centennial, Alexander Graham Bell would patent the telephone. The nation had also grown spectacularly in size. The Louisiana Purchase in 1803 added the territory between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains, and the cession following the Mexican War added the Southwest. Colorado was admitted to the Union in 1876 as the thirty-eighth state; it would be known as the Centennial State. On the exhibition's opening day President and Mrs. U. S. Grant, accompanied by the Brazilian Emperor Dom Pedro and his wife, Theresa, were among the notables present. At the scheduled time the President and the Emperor opened the valves that started a huge steam engine in Machinery Hall. The steam engine in turn supplied power to hundreds of other machines at the fair. When the wheels began to turn, guns roared, church bells pealed, and whistles blew. The fair, and the Centennial, had officially begun. Grant was in the last year of his second term as President. Elected in 1868 and reelected in 1872, he was the second Republican President; Lincoln, of course, was the first. In the two decades since its founding, the party had achieved a remarkable success. The event that precipitated its founding was the enactment by Congress of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854. In that year Stephen A. Douglas, an able and ambitious Democratic senator from Illinois introduced in the Senate a bill providing for what he called "popular sovereignty"-and what his opponents called "squatter sovereignty"-to determine whether or not the territories of Kansas and Nebraska shouldRehnquist, William H. is the author of 'Centennial Crisis The Disputed Election of 1876', published 2004 under ISBN 9780375413872 and ISBN 0375413871.