The Cipher Dispatches
Tilden's chances for the presidency suffered a blow in October 1876 at the hands of the Republican New York Tribune. The Tribune claimed to have unearthed and decoded secret "cipher" telegrams sent by Tilden's agents at the height of the 1876 electoral dispute, apparently offering bribes to vote-counters in the contested states: $50,000 for Florida, $80,000 for South Carolina, and $5,000 for the single vote from Oregon.
Tilden denied emphatically all knowledge of such dispatches, and appeared voluntarily before a Congressional sub-committee in New York City to clear himself of the charge. The attempts to implicate him in corrupt transactions were not successful and he was cleared of any personal wrongdoing. However, his political opponents endeavored to make capital in subsequent campaigns, out of the so-called 'Cipher Dispatches'. Even though the charges were false, the scandal damaged Tilden.
Read more about this topic: Samuel J. Tilden
Famous quotes containing the word cipher:
“It is not an arbitrary “decree of God,” but in the nature of man, that a veil shuts down on the facts of to-morrow; for the soul will not have us read any other cipher than that of cause and effect. By this veil, which curtains events, it instructs the children of men to live in to-day.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)