The Alabama Recount--Part
5
By Tom Carney, Editor Old
Huntsville
With the whole country watching, it was hoped that a speedy
and fair resolution of the election would take place. After days of counting and
recounting, and in some cases re-recounting, it was announced that the tally was
complete.
With swarms of people crowded into a small room, the
Democratic minority spoke first. Waving to the room to be silent, he announced
that the new figures showed Joe Wheeler in the lead by 4,712 votes.
Instant jubilation broke out among the Wheeler supporters as
they yelled and clapped one another on the backs.
The jubilation did not last long, however. Minutes later a
Republican representative made his way to the front and begged for silence.
After the crowd calmed he read the majority report stating that, in their
opinion, William Manning Lowe had
won the election by 848 votes.
However
outrageous and partisan the results were, the fact remained that the Republicans
were the majority of the committee, and Congress, and their opinion would
prevail.
The committee made its report to the House the following June
2, 1881 stating that “Joseph Wheeler is not entitled to a seat in this House
of Representatives.”
The resolution to unseat Wheeler was adopted 148 to 3, with
140 Democrats abstaining.
Immediately after being escorted to the Speaker's desk where he was sworn in,
Lowe sent his friends in Huntsville the following telegram: “The fraud has
been eliminated. I am seated at last.”
Lowe’s
victory was hollow. In all, Wheeler had served ten of the eleven months the
Forty-seventh Congress was in session before being unseated. Lowe served the
remaining one month and returned to his home in Huntsville where he soon died of
tuberculosis.
In the next election, General Joe Wheeler was easily elected
to Congress where he remained for the next 18 years.
One hundred and twenty years later Florida would become known
as “the land of the hanging chads,” but no one would remember that Alabama
showed the way.
Return
to Part 1
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