Samuel J. Tilden

In 1856, Tilden defended Azariah C. Flagg’s election as New York City comptroller. Flagg’s opponents claimed that a district’s totals had been reversed: the votes credited to Flagg, they said, really belonged to his challenger. The original tally of the regular party tickets was missing.

As fellow lawyer James C. Carter later described the case, Tilden worked backward through the surviving returns. Candidates appeared in different combinations on different tickets. By comparing their totals, he could reconstruct the missing count and expose the inconsistencies in the opposing evidence. He gave the jurors sheets of figures so they could follow the calculation themselves.

“It is an honest ghost,” he said of the tally he proposed to bring back from the grave. “It will disturb no true man.” Flagg prevailed.

By the time the Tweed scandal broke open in 1871, Tilden was chairman of New York’s Democratic State Committee. He was a cautious party insider who had held a senior position in Tammany Hall, with years of experience in its organizations and rivalries. He had publicly opposed William M. “Boss” Tweed’s concentration of power in 1870, but avoided an outright political rupture. The disclosures of 1871 made the Ring vulnerable, and that September he moved decisively against men whose power helped sustain his own party.

Tweed and his associates had made municipal government enormously profitable for themselves. Contractors submitted inflated bills; the city paid; the proceeds were divided among the participants. The New York Times published devastating accounts, and Thomas Nast’s cartoons supplied faces and symbols for the public anger. Tilden’s contribution was to establish where the money had actually gone.

The problem was more difficult than showing that a bill was outrageous. A successful prosecution needed to connect particular payments to particular people. For the fraud known as the Six Million Audit, Tilden examined the accounts of the men involved, tracing deposits back to the individual items recorded on bank deposit slips.

Carter’s account of the investigation describes how Tilden found a recurring division of the proceeds. Knowing those proportions, he could calculate each conspirator’s share of a city payment. The bank records then supplied the check: deposits in the corresponding amounts, made on the very day the city paid.

Small discrepancies still troubled him, even though they scarcely weakened the case. Eventually, Carter recalled, the figures matched to the penny. The participants had left a record of their arrangement in the ordinary paperwork of their banking.

Tilden was one of several people who helped bring down the Ring. Reporters, political opponents, lawyers and investigators all mattered. Back in the State Assembly, he also pursued the removal of corrupt judges. Courts that protected the Ring could frustrate even the best-documented case.

He testified at Tweed’s trials. The first ended in a hung jury in January 1873. At the second, that November, Tweed was convicted.

The cheerful gathering on Gramercy Park was followed by months of uncertainty. Tilden’s recorded popular-vote lead exceeded a quarter of a million. In the Electoral College, he had 184 undisputed votes; 185 were needed to win. Hayes had 165, with twenty votes contested in Florida, Louisiana, South Carolina and Oregon. Tilden needed one of those votes. Hayes needed all twenty.

Those figures cannot be separated from the conditions in which Americans voted. White supremacist violence and intimidation had kept Black citizens from the polls in parts of the South. Black voters overwhelmingly supported the Republicans. Both parties charged fraud, and competing authorities claimed the right to certify results. A national popular-vote total could not account for people prevented from casting a ballot.

Nor was Tilden’s opposition to corruption a promise to continue federal Reconstruction. He had opposed slavery’s extension and favored preserving the Union while opposing Lincoln’s wartime policies. He remained a Democrat committed to limiting federal intervention in the South. His party’s demand for “home rule” served Southern white Democrats seeking to recover control of state governments. The rights of Black citizens were at stake alongside the candidates’ fortunes.

Congress created a fifteen-member Electoral Commission to settle the disputed returns: five senators, five representatives and five Supreme Court justices. The plan depended on an independent justice, David Davis, holding the balance between the parties. But after his election to the Senate, Davis declined to serve. Republican justice Joseph Bradley took his place, giving the Republicans an eight-to-seven majority.

The commission awarded all twenty contested votes to Hayes, each decision dividing along party lines. When Congress completed the count on March 2, 1877, the result was Hayes 185, Tilden 184.

Tilden and his supporters regarded the result as a grave injustice. He did not, however, try to establish a rival presidency. In a later newspaper interview, he said that once the electoral process had been completed, taking an independent oath of office would have been ridiculous: he lacked the formal authority to do it. He continued to believe he had been elected.

Political negotiations accompanied the final count; historians differ over how neatly those understandings can be described as a single bargain. After taking office, Hayes withdrew the troops protecting the remaining Republican state governments in Louisiana and South Carolina. Southern promises to respect Black civil and voting rights were broken.

As historian Eric Foner explains in his account of Reconstruction, the collapse of federal protection helped clear the way for disenfranchisement, segregation and racial terror. Tilden lost the presidency; Black Southerners faced the loss of the political rights they had fought to secure.

The books—eventually numbering some twenty thousand volumes—were an occupation in themselves. Tilden collected works of history, law and literature. In 1885, a Senate reporter named Theodore Shuey wrote after hearing that Tilden had acquired a financial diary of Thomas Jefferson. Shuey owned another, from Jefferson’s years as a young lawyer, and wondered whether Tilden would like that one too.

It was an apt object to offer a man so interested in the relationship between public affairs and private accounts. But collecting also gave him pleasures independent of politics. His later letters return to reading as other activities became harder. In February 1886, he told a friend that his eyesight still allowed him to spend most of his time with books, even as difficulties with his hands and voice limited conversation.

He never married. His correspondence records a busy exchange of invitations, family greetings and news from old friends.

Gramercy Park was not his only home. In 1879, Tilden rented Greystone, a country property in Yonkers overlooking the Hudson. He later bought it and added neighboring land.

Retirement was incomplete. Admirers continued to hope that he would run for president again. His name remained powerful in Democratic politics, but his health increasingly limited what he could undertake. He did not run again in 1880 or 1884.

Grover Cleveland’s election in 1884 brought a Democrat to the White House at last. Tilden remained interested in appointments, financial policy and the practical problems of governing. In January 1885, he invited the president-elect to rest at Greystone after leaving the governorship.

He died at Greystone on August 4, 1886, aged seventy-two. His will directed the bulk of his fortune—roughly five million dollars—to establish the Tilden Trust for a free library and reading room in New York City. The collector who had furnished his own houses with books wanted to provide a place where other people could read them.

Relatives challenged the bequest. In 1891, the New York Court of Appeals declared the charitable provision invalid. The will allowed the executors to choose among charitable purposes, leaving no definite beneficiary with the right to demand that they carry it out. The lawyer’s own instructions had almost defeated his purpose.

But his friend and executor John Bigelow and his fellow trustees had already secured an important agreement. That May, before the court’s final ruling, Tilden’s grandniece Laura Pelton Hazard surrendered her claim to half the residuary estate in return for a payment. That agreement and the final settlement in 1892 preserved more than two million dollars and Tilden’s personal library for the public.

New York already had the Astor and Lenox libraries, with substantial collections but separate organizations. Bigelow helped bring them together with the Tilden Trust. On May 23, 1895, the three institutions consolidated as The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

Tilden’s money and books supplied part of what the new institution needed. Other donors, the city and generations of librarians would build on it. The New York Free Circulating Library joined in 1901, and Andrew Carnegie’s gift helped provide neighborhood branches. The main building on Fifth Avenue opened in 1911, a quarter of a century after Tilden’s death.

The Library’s 1916 handbook described a reading room with seats for 768 people. Readers could take books from the reference shelves themselves or request others from the stacks. The instructions were practical: fill out a slip, receive a number, collect the book. Afterward, leave it on the table so it could be returned to its proper place.

On Gramercy Park, Tilden’s former home had already begun its life as the National Arts Club, which acquired it in 1906. On Fifth Avenue, his name joined Astor’s and Lenox’s above the entrance to the new library.

The words beneath Tilden’s name gave the purpose of the Tilden Trust: “To serve the interests of science and popular education.” Upstairs, the reading tables were ready.