The Presidential Election of 1884 was a hotly contested one, and the citizens of Madison were very engaged in the outcome of it. MHS’s favorite Dock Road resident, Frederic Marcus Wood Sr. had some intriguing observations about the election process in his autobiography Echoes of the Nineties.

The Presidential Election campaign of 1884 was considered one of the dirtiest in history, although by today’s standards seems almost tame. Democratic candidate Grover Cleveland was accused of seducing a widow and fathering her child, which he didn’t deny. Rumors spread that Cleveland was a habitual drunkard and libertine, and that he kept women convenient to the New York Governor’s mansion he lived in, and that he was secretly being treated for a ‘malignant’ disease. Cleveland’s Republican opponent James Blaine, called by some ‘Slippery Jim’, was known for his power to charm and persuade. He was accused of collusion, graft, and perjury, had grown rich too quickly, far beyond the potential of his congressional salary. Blaine was financially involved in railroads, and as Speaker of the House, steered legislation in favor of the railroads he had interest in. In the fierce campaign, the usual political issues took a poor second place, and the ‘real’ issue was seen as a race between a public immoralist and a private immoralist.

Wood, who was age twelve or thirteen at the time of the election, didn’t have any insight to offer on the vice or immorality and animosity of the election. He did however recount some of the local traditions surrounding elections, as well as how news was delivered in 1884:

In our granary hung a battered kerosene torch, a globular object painted red, white and blue, and fitted to swing freely at the end of a long handle. It was a relic of the Garfield campaign of 1880, when torchlight processions lighted the way of the honest and patriotic Republican through the darkness of Democratic iniquity. It was the light that failed however in the case of the Plumed Knight vs. Grover Cleveland in 1884 and, as I recall, it was never re-lighted in our community. There was one of those red, white and blue torches in every Republican granary in the neighborhood, and we boys had to overcome some reluctance on the part of our elders in order to use them when we went spearing suckers in Dock Road creek. But that was in the dim, misty past: the campaign torches are no more, Dock Road creek has dwindled to a mere remnant of its former size, and somebody – probably a Democrat – long ago thought up the iniquitous law against spearing suckers.

The torchlight procession was only one of many customs, now relegated to oblivion, of the interesting period covered by the Eighties and Nineties. It was the age of emotions and enthusiasms quite unknown today.

One time the crowd at Corlett’s store chipped in a nickel apiece and sent Elbert Harper on horseback to the telegraph station at Madison to see if the station operator could get some election returns. Those were the days when “As goes New York, so goes the nation,” and Elbert was specifically instructed to get the news from New York. He rode away in full consciousness of the importance of his mission while the expectant crowd settled down again to await his return.

Finally a watcher decried the solitary horseman rounding the Middle Ridge bend and heading down the home stretch at full gallop. A few seconds later Elbert, who was plainly laboring under the stress of great emotion, checked his panting steed and shouted:

“Boys, New York’s gone thirty thousand!”
“Which way, Elbert, which way?” chorused the excited crowd.
A look of pained surprise came over Elbert’s erstwhile beaming countenance; he wiped his perspiring brow with the back of his hand and said sadly,
“Gosh dinged if I didn’t fergit to ask!”

For the record – Grover Cleveland won. With over ten million votes cast, Cleveland defeated Blaine by only sixty-three thousand.

Submitted by Jesse Devin, Social Media Assistant Madison Historical Society