1880 United States presidential election and Related Topics

James A. Garfield

The 20th president of the United States, serving from March 4, 1881, until his death six months later.

Replica of the log cabin in Moreland Hills, Ohio, where Garfield was born

Garfield as a brigadier general during the Civil War

Middle Creek battlefield. Garfield commanded from the distant hill in the center of the photo.

Salmon P. Chase was Garfield's ally until Andrew Johnson's impeachment trial.

Garfield Monument, by the Capitol, where he served almost twenty years

Editorial cartoon: Uncle Sam directs U.S. Senators and Representatives implicated in the Crédit Mobilier scheme to commit Hara-Kiri.

Garfield (second from right in the row of commissioners just below the gallery) served on the Electoral Commission that decided the disputed 1876 presidential election. Painting by Cornelia Adele Strong Fassett.

Garfield's proof of the Pythagorean theorem features a right triangle within a trapezoid.

Following Grant's defeat for the nomination Puck magazine satirized Robert E. Lee's surrender to him at Appomattox by depicting Grant's giving up his sword to Garfield.

President Garfield in reviewing stand, viewing inauguration ceremonies, on March 4, 1881

Line engraving of Garfield, produced around 1902 by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing as part of a presentation album of the first 26 presidents

An 1881 Puck cartoon shows Garfield finding a baby at his front door with a tag marked "Civil Service Reform, compliments of R.B. Hayes". Hayes, his predecessor in the presidency, is seen in the background dressed like a woman and holding a bag marked "R.B. Hayes' Savings, Fremont, Ohio".

Official White House portrait of James Garfield, 1881

James G. Blaine, Garfield's Secretary of State

Garfield, shot by Charles J. Guiteau, collapses as Secretary of State Blaine gestures for help. Engraving from Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper.

Baltimore & Potomac Railroad Passenger Terminal in Washington, where Garfield was shot July 2, 1881

Garfield's casket lying in state at the Capitol Rotunda

Stereoscopic images of the Schofield family vault where Garfield's remains were kept until completion of his permanent memorial

thumb|alt=A large three-story house of wood and stone|Lawnfield, Garfield National Historic Site, location of the "front porch campaign"

Garfield Memorial at Lake View Cemetery in Cleveland, Ohio

Garfield Monument, Golden Gate Park, San Francisco by Frank Happersberger

In the 1880 presidential election, he conducted a low-key front porch campaign and narrowly defeated Democratic nominee Winfield Scott Hancock.

James B. Weaver

Member of the United States House of Representatives and two-time candidate for President of the United States.

Weaver's home, built in 1867 in Bloomfield

Weaver as a candidate for Congress, 1878

Thomas Nast depicts Weaver as an ungainly donkey who is finally recognized by Speaker Samuel J. Randall.

An 1880 cartoon in Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper ridicules the Greenback party as a collection of disparate radicals.

Weaver supported white settlers' right to homesteads in the Unassigned Lands.

Weaver supported Democrat William Jennings Bryan for president in 1896.

The Greenbackers nominated Weaver for president in 1880, but he received only 3.3 percent of the popular vote.

1848 United States presidential election

The 16th quadrennial presidential election, held on Tuesday, November 7, 1848.

Map of presidential election results by county

"Cock of the walk" - Zachary Taylor as victor

Map of Whig presidential election results by county

Map of Democratic presidential election results by county

Map of Free Soil presidential election results by county

Map of Liberty presidential election results by county

Map of "Other" presidential election results by county

Cartogram of presidential election results by county

Cartogram of Whig presidential election results by county

Cartogram of Democratic presidential election results by county

Cartogram of Free Soil presidential election results by county

Cartogram of Liberty presidential election results by county

Cartogram of "Other" presidential election results by county

This would only happen again twice, in 1880 and 2020.

Chester A. Arthur

American lawyer and politician who served as the 21st president of the United States from 1881 to 1885.

Arthur's birthplace in Fairfield, Vermont

Arthur's home where he spent most of his adulthood years in Manhattan, New York City

The New York Custom House (formerly the Merchants' Exchange building at 55 Wall Street) was Arthur's office for seven years.

A cartoon depicting President Rutherford B. Hayes kicking Arthur out of the New York Custom House

Arthur taking the oath of office as administered by Judge John R. Brady at Arthur's home in New York City, September 20, 1881

On the threshold of office, what have we to expect of him? In an 1881 Puck cartoon, Arthur faces the cabinet after President Garfield was shot.

Arthur in 1881 (portrait by Ole Peter Hansen Balling)

Arthur in 1884 (portrait by George Peter Alexander Healy)

A political cartoon from 1882, criticizing Chinese exclusion

The "Squadron of Evolution" at anchor in 1889, after Yorktown had been added: Chicago, Yorktown, Boston, Atlanta

Readjuster Party leader William Mahone pressed civil rights in Virginia

Portrait of Arthur by Eastman Johnson (1887)

Arthur on an expedition in Yellowstone National Park along with Philip Sheridan and Robert Todd Lincoln

Official White House portrait of Chester A. Arthur (Daniel Huntington)

Chester A. Arthur statue at Madison Square in New York City, Bissell 1898

Arthur's grave at Albany Rural Cemetery in Menands, New York

Garfield won the Republican nomination for president in 1880, and Arthur was nominated for vice president to balance the ticket as an Eastern Stalwart.

Samuel J. Tilden

American politician who served as the 25th Governor of New York and was the Democratic candidate for president in the disputed 1876 United States presidential election.

Tilden was a protege of Martin Van Buren, the 8th President of the United States.

Campaign poster for the election of 1876

In the aftermath of the 1876 presidential election, the electoral votes of four states were disputed.

Rutherford B. Hayes defeated Tilden in the 1876 election.

Friends tried to make Tilden a major contender for the Democratic presidential nomination in the 1880 and 1884 presidential elections, but he had left politics and declined to run.

Winfield Scott Hancock

Major General Winfield Scott Hancock. From the Liljenquist Family Collection of Civil War Photographs, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress

Winfield S. Hancock and staff during the Civil War

Hancock, surrounded by three of his division commanders: Francis C. Barlow, David B. Birney, and John Gibbon during the Wilderness campaign

The execution of the Lincoln assassination conspirators, July 7, 1865

Andrew Johnson thought Hancock was the ideal Reconstruction general.

General Winfield Scott Hancock leading Ulysses S. Grant's funeral procession in New York City

Statue of Hancock on the Smith Memorial Arch in Philadelphia

General Winfield Scott Hancock Memorial in Washington, D.C.

1886 $2 Silver Certificate depicting Hancock

Winfield Scott Hancock (February 14, 1824 – February 9, 1886) was a United States Army officer and the Democratic nominee for President of the United States in 1880.

A $5 United States Note of the series of 1862 popularly known as a "greenback". owing to the color of ink used on the reverse

Greenback Party

American political party with an anti-monopoly ideology which was active between 1874 and 1889.

Salmon P. Chase, Abraham Lincoln's Secretary of the Treasury, was a leading exponent of so-called "greenback" currency during the American Civil War

Contemporary news illustration of a run on the 4th National Bank of New York during the Panic of 1873

Peter Cooper of New York, presidential candidate of the Greenback Party.

James B. Weaver, presidential nominee of the Greenback Labor Party, was later a prominent figure in the Populist movement.

Representative Benjamin F. Butler of Massachusetts was the Greenback nominee for president in 1884

The party ran candidates in three presidential elections, in 1876, 1880, and 1884, before it faded away.

Prohibition Party

Political party in the United States known for its historic opposition to the sale or consumption of alcoholic beverages and as an integral part of the temperance movement.

National Prohibition Convention, Cincinnati, Ohio, 1892

1884 National Prohibition Convention in Lafayette Hall,
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Party flag from the beginning of the 20th century

The Drunkard's Progress: A lithograph by Nathaniel Currier supporting the temperance movement, January 1846

In 1879, Frances Willard became the president of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union and although it had remained non-partisan in the 1876 and 1880 presidential elections, Willard advocated for a resolution under which the organization would pledge its support to whichever party would support alcoholic prohibition.

Senator Roscoe Conkling, leader of the Stalwarts.

Stalwarts (politics)

The Stalwarts were a faction of the Republican Party that existed briefly in the United States during as well as after Reconstruction and the Gilded Age during the 1870s and 1880s.

Ulysses S. Grant, who Stalwarts supported in 1880.

The faction favored Ulysses S. Grant, the eighteenth President of the United States (1869–1877), running for a third term in the 1880 United States presidential election.

Republican Party (United States)

One of the two major contemporary political parties in the United States, along with its main historic rival, the Democratic Party.

Abraham Lincoln, 16th president of the United States (1861–1865) and the first Republican to hold the office

Charles R. Jennison, an anti-slavery militia leader associated with the Jayhawkers from Kansas and an early Republican politician in the region

Ulysses S. Grant, 18th president of the United States (1869–1877)

James G. Blaine, 28th & 31st Secretary of State (1881; 1889–1892)

William McKinley, 25th president of the United States (1897–1901)

Theodore Roosevelt, 26th president of the United States (1901–1909)

Herbert Hoover, 31st president of the United States (1929–1933)

Ronald Reagan, 40th president of the United States (1981–1989)

Donald Trump, 45th president of the United States (2017–2021)

Calvin Coolidge, 30th president of the United States (1923–1929)

Arnold Schwarzenegger, 38th governor of California (2003–2011)

John McCain, United States senator from Arizona (1987–2018)

Donald Rumsfeld, 21st United States Secretary of Defense (2001–2006)

Colin Powell, 65th United States Secretary of State (2001–2005)

Newt Gingrich, 50th Speaker of the House of Representatives (1995–1999)

Annual population growth in the U.S. by county - 2010s

This map shows the vote in the 2020 presidential election by county.

Political Spectrum Libertarian Left Centrist Right Authoritarian

U.S. opinion on gun control issues is deeply divided along political lines, as shown in this 2021 survey.

Ahead of the 1880 general election, Republican James G. Blaine ran for the party nomination supporting Hayes' gold standard push and supporting his civil reforms.