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The two major parties, the Republicans and the Democrats, continued to battle for a closely divided electorate, with party differences being based on ideology, ethnic and religious backgrounds, and Civil War loyalties. At the time most Northern Protestants and practically all African-Americans, voted Republican. White Southerners and northern Catholics generally voted Democrat.
Other issues dividing voters were tariff reform and the gold standard. These divisions extended within the parties themselves. The money debate was about which metal should be used to back up the dollar's value. Before the Civil War, only gold and silver coin had ever been legal tender in the United States. But during the war, as mounting costs forced Congress to issue "greenbacks" (dollar bills backed by government bonds). Greenbacks resulted in severe inflation. After the war, bondholders and other creditors (mostly in the North) wanted to return to the gold standard, while debtors (especially in the South and West) benefited from the way inflation reduced their debts. Workers and small businessmen liked the way inflation made for easier borrowing. This issue cut across party lines and led to the formation of a third party known as the Greenback Party. Those who favored the gold-backed currency were called "hard money" supporters, while those opposed were "soft money" supporters.
Tariffs also played a role in the campaign. During the Civil War, Congress raised protective tariffs to new heights, partly to pay for the war and also because high tariffs were popular in the North. A high tariff meant that foreign goods were more expensive, which made it easier for American businesses to sell goods domestically. High tariffs protected American jobs and were supported by republican. But a majority of Democrats saw high tariffs as making goods unnecessarily expensive and adding to the growing federal revenues. Many Northern Democrats supported high tariffs, however, for the same economic reasons that their Republican counterparts.
Four years earlier, in 1876, Republican Rutherford B. Hayes of Ohio defeated Democrat Samuel J. Tilden of New York in one of the most hotly contested presidential elections to that time in the nation's history. Democrats called Hayes' victory a "stolen election" and used this as a party rallying cry. Tilden was seen as the front-runner for the 1880 nomination. Even before the controversy, Hayes had pledged not to run for a second term. The Republican party was split between two factions: those loyal to New York Senator Roscoe Conkling (called the "Stalwarts") and those loyal to Maine Senator James G. Blaine (called the "Half-Breeds").
The Republicans were the first to hold their convention that year. It was held in Chicago beginning on June 2. The leading candidates for the Republican nomination were former president Ulysses S. Grant, Senator James G. Blaine and Treasury Secretary John Sherman. Grant, who had served two terms as president from 1869 to 1877, was seeking an unprecedented third term in the office. He was backed by Conkling's Stalwart faction. Blaine was the candidate of the Half-Breed faction. Sherman, who was the brother of Civil War General William Tecumseh Sherman, was a former Senator from Ohio serving in Hayes's cabinet. He was backed by a smaller delegation that supported neither of the major factions.
On the first ballot, Grant and Blaine had 304 and 285 votes, respectively, while Sherman received 93. None of the candidates were close to victory, and the balloting continued without any of the candidates coming close to a majority for over thirty ballots. After the thirty-fifth ballot, Blaine and Sherman delegates switched their support to the new "dark horse" candidate, Representative James A. Garfield of Ohio. On the next ballot, Garfield won the nomination by receiving 399 votes, most of them former Blaine and Sherman delegates.
To keep the Stalwarts onside, Garfield's supporters suggested Levi P. Morton for vice president. Morton declined, based on Conkling's advice. They next offered the nomination to Chester A. Arthur, another New York Stalwart. Conkling advised him to decline, but Arthur accepted and won the nomination. This was the the longest Republican National Convention ever held.
Later that month, the Democrats held their convention in Cincinnati. Two leading candidates were Major General Winfield Scott Hancock of Pennsylvania and Senator Thomas F. Bayard of Delaware. Samuel Tilden was not officially a candidate, but he wielded considerable influence at the convention. Tilden was lukewarm about his willingness to participate in another campaign, leading some of his former supporters to park their votes elsewhere. The first round of balloting was inconclusive, with Hancock and Bayard leading the count. Before the second round, Tilden's withdrawal from the campaign became known for certain and delegates shifted to Hancock, who was nominated. William Hayden English from the swing state of Indiana, was nominated for Vice President.
The Greenback Party convention gathered in Chicago in mid-June, using the hall recently vacated by the Republicans. Six men were candidates for the Greenback nomination. James B. Weaver, an Iowa congressman and Civil War general, was the clear favorite and he won a majority of the 850 delegates' votes on the first ballot. Barzillai J. Chambers, a Texas businessman and Confederate veteran, was selected as his running mate also on the first ballot. Although the delegates were united on the currency issue, the clashed over other controversial issues such as women's suffrage, Chinese immigration, and government regulation of working conditions.
Garfield had served as a major general in the Union Army during the Civil War, and fought in the battles of Middle Creek, Shiloh, and Chickamauga. He had served as a member of the House of Representatives since first elected in 1862. He firmly supported the gold standard and favored a moderate approach for civil rights enforcement for freedmen. After his nomination, Garfield met with party leaders in an attempt to heal the schism between the Stalwarts and Half-Breeds. As was traditional at the time, Garfield conducted a "front porch campaign", leaving the actual campaigning to surrogates.
Hancock was born and raised in Pennsylvania.He had served in the Army for four decades, including service in the Mexican-American War and as a Union general in the Civil War. During Reconstruction, he sided with then-President Andrew Johnson in working for a quick end to military occupation of the South.
Hancock and the Democrats were expected to carry the Solid South, while Garfield expected to win in the North. The battleground states included New York and a few of the Midwestern states. There were few policy differences between the major party candidates. Republicans campaigned by "waving the bloody shirt" (i.e. blaming the Democratic Party for secession and four years of civil war). They said that if the Democrats were victorious they would reverse the gains of that war, dishonor Union veterans, and pay Confederate soldiers' pensions out of the federal treasury. Fifteen years had passed since the end of the war and a prominent Union general was running as the Democratic Party's candidate for president, so this appeal to wartime loyalties was of diminishing utility.
The Democrats, for their part, campaigned on the character of the candidates. They attacked Garfield for his connection with the Crédit Mobilier of America scandal of the early 1870s, in which many members of Congress were bribed by the Crédit Mobilier corporation, a railroad construction company. Garfield's precise involvement was uncertain, and Democrats played on that murkiness. Republicans did not attack Hancock's patriotism, but they did portray him as uninformed on the issues.
For the Greenback Party, Weaver embarked on a speaking tour of the South in July and August, but with an ex-Republican Union general at the head of the ticket, this gained little traction. When Weaver campaigned in the North in September and October, Republicans accused him of purposely dividing the vote to help Democrats win a plurality in marginal states. In state-level races which preceded the vote for President, Greenback candidates did split the vote to help Democrats to defeat Republican candidates, including in the governor's race in Maine, which was considered to be solid Republican territory.
After their defeat in Maine, the Republicans began to emphasize policy differences more. The Democratic platform had endorsed "a tariff for revenue only." Garfield's supporters spun this statement to paint the Democrats as unsympathetic to the plight of American workers, who benefited from a high protective tariff. This issue cut Democratic support in industrialized Northern states. Hancock made matters worse when he said in a letter that "the tariff question is a local question". Republicans used this statement to support their portrayal of Hancock as someone who did not understand the issue.
Republicans rebounded in October state elections in Ohio and Indiana. Democrats had selected English as Hancock's running mate because of his popularity in Indiana. Their defeat there led to talk of dropping English from the ticket, but this did not come to pass. In the final weeks before the election, the issue of Chinese immigration became a hot topic. All of the parties had pledged to limit immigration from China, but on October 20, a Democratic newspaper published a letter, purportedly from Garfield to a group of businessmen, pledging to keep immigration at the current levels so that industry could keep workers' wages low. Garfield denounced the letter as a ruse, but by this time one hundred thousand copies of the newspaper were mailed to California and Oregon. The letter later was exposed as a forgery.
When all the ballots were counted, the popular vote was very close, with less than 2,000 votes separated Garfield and Hancock, the closest popular vote of any presidential election before or since. Voters turned out in record numbers with 78 percent of eligible voters casting a ballot. Weaver won more than 3 percent, tripling the Greenback total of four years earlier. Republicans won the House by a twelve-seat margin and the Senate was evenly divided. Garfield carried the crucial state of New York by 20,000 votes out of 1.1 million cast there. Other states were much closer; Hancock's margin of victory in California was only 22 votes.
But in the vote that counted, the electoral college, the vote was more decisive. As expected, Hancock carried the South, but Garfield swept all of the Northern states except for New Jersey, which he lost by just two thousand votes. Both candidates won nineteen states, but Garfield won in the more populous North translated. He won 214 electoral votes, compared to 155 for Hancock.
Hancock was convinced that the Republicans won New York by fraud, but he lacked sufficient evidence of this and did not want a repetition of the turmoil which occurred in 1876, so the Democrats did not pursue the matter.
Garfield`s victory was short-lived, literally. He was shot by an assassin in July of 1881 and died two months later.