Destiny of the Republic - By Candice Millard Page 0,19
vitriol they had witnessed the preceding week, no one in the convention hall believed that their candidate, or any candidate, would receive on the first ballot the 379 votes necessary to win. Neither did they imagine, however, that they were at the beginning of a grueling process that would stagger on for two days, requiring far and away the most ballots ever taken in a Republican convention.
Grant, as had been expected, came closest to the winning number after the first ballot, receiving 304 votes to Blaine’s 284 and Sherman’s 93. Three other, lesser known, candidates together received 74 votes. Little changed on the second ballot, but on the third, two new names suddenly appeared—a single vote for Benjamin Harrison, a senator from Indiana who would become president of the United States nine years later, and another for James A. Garfield.
As the balloting continued, the solitary delegate from Pennsylvania who had cast his vote for Garfield refused to withdraw it, even though his candidate did not give him the slightest encouragement, or even acknowledgment. He shifted his vote to another candidate for five ballots—the fourteenth through the eighteenth—while the Grant and Blaine men fought tooth and claw over every delegate, but then rededicated himself to Garfield on the nineteenth ballot, and never wavered again.
While tensions rose to an excruciating level inside the convention hall, outside, crowds watched the proceedings with equal intensity. Hundreds of men and women, largely Grant and Blaine supporters, but also those who had no interest beyond mere curiosity, gathered in Printing House Square, where Chicago’s biggest newspapers had promised to post the balloting results as they received them. “By high noon, the time when the first returns were expected,” a reporter wrote, “the whole of the square, including the space about the Franklin statue, was filled with an eager throng, who awaited the appearances of the vote with ill-concealed impatience. The sun shown out hotly, and the buzz increased each minute.”
A reporter from the Boston Globe, who had been forced to “elbow [his] way through the throng” to enter the convention hall, watched the balloting with growing astonishment. As the results of the nineteenth ballot were announced, he listened with the feverish interest of a man at a racetrack, his last dollar on a horse hurtling toward a receding finish line. “Grant holds his own and gains one,” he wrote, as fast as he could. “Blaine has dropped down to 279, the lowest figure he has struck yet. Sherman gained a bit, and scores 96…. The twentieth ballot follows rapidly. It runs much the same as the others. Blaine loses three votes in Indiana, and the remark seems sound that Blaine is breaking up. Grant gains a notch in Tennessee, which is important, and the vacillating North Carolina delegate happens to swing on to Grant’s aid this time, making a gain of two. The call is over, and still there is no result.” The voting continued for twelve hours, with twenty-eight ballots, but when the convention hall finally emptied at nearly ten that night, the party was no closer to a nominee than it had been that morning.
The next day, as the delegates made their weary way back to the hall, few of them held out any hope for a quick conclusion. They could not have helped but be dismally reminded of the Democratic convention of 1860, which took not only fifty-nine ballots but two conventions in two different cities before it had a nominee—a nominee who would go on to lose to the Republican candidate, Abraham Lincoln. When the first ballot of the day, the twenty-ninth, showed little change from the day before, their fears were only confirmed. The thirtieth through thirty-third were equally stagnant, and the hall was filled with a thick feeling of desperation.
On the thirty-fourth ballot, however, an extraordinary thing happened. As the votes were being taken, the delegates from Wisconsin made a shocking reversal. Their eighteen votes, which on the preceding ballot had been distributed between Grant, Blaine, Sherman, and Elihu Washburne, who had served briefly as Grant’s secretary of state, were now divided between just two men—Grant and Garfield. More extraordinary still, Grant received only two of those votes. Suddenly, the single vote from Pennsylvania that Garfield had chosen simply to ignore had grown to seventeen, which was a serious bid for the nomination and a situation of genuine concern for Garfield.
Stunned, Garfield leaped to his feet to protest the vote. “Mr. President,” he began. Hoar, who was privately delighted by