Abraham Lincoln in 1863
As the tighter-than-a-hangman’s-noose presidential race approaches its denouncement, Donald J. Trump and some of his fellow Republicans, despite the absence of evidence, are still complaining nationally about voter fraud in the 2020 race and predicting the same on November 5. This is especially true here in Nevada, where Republicans have especially groused about supposed future and past voting by non-citizens and non-residents. The GOP apparently thinks that most of these folks are in the tank for Democrat Kamala Harris, even though Trump’s name graces the top of the state’s tallest non-casino building just off the Las Vegas Strip.
As it happens, tomorrow is Nevada Day, the start of a three-day holiday weekend in Nevada. Government offices and schools are closed. Celebrated on the last Friday of October, it commemorates Nevada’s admission to the union in 1864 as the 36th state.
Why do I bring this up? Because Nevada actually became a state to help rig the 1864 re-election of Trump’s fellow Republican, Abraham Lincoln. Putting aside the party it favored, that sort of makes today’s claims of voter fraud pale by comparison. But there are some interesting parallels.
Since becoming New to Las Vegas, I have written about the subject several times in posts, from which I draw much of this material.
The year was 1864. The United States was in the fourth year of the bloody Civil War. Lincoln was running for a second term. With 11 Southern states in secession, there was growing discontent against the war in the North. Strong pockets of anti-Lincoln sentiments existed in places like New York, then-tiny Los Angeles and my native New Jersey, the only northern state with legal slaves (13, to be exact).
You think Trump is having problems now with his ex-generals, reportedly complaining they weren’t loyal to him like, say, Hitler’s generals (who only tried to kill Der Führer three times)? The Democratic candidate against Lincoln was one of his own leaders, General George B. McClellan, who actually ran while still in the military.
Not unlike conditions now, the political scene was muddled. The Republicans were badly split. One faction, headed by the war criminal John C. Frémont (yes, the fellow for whom glitzy Fremont Street in Las Vegas would be named) wanted an immediate end to slavery and was unhappy with Lincoln’s slower approach. The Democrats were even more split, with War Democrats, Peace Democrats, Moderate Peace Democrats, Peace with Slavery Democrats, and so on.
Lincoln already had helped engineer one new state. Some 41 western counties of Virginia split to form the pro-union (and pro-Lincoln) state of West Virginia in 1863. That would give him five more electoral votes. Lincoln might need every one he could get. Where else could he look for more?
At the outset of the Civil War, Congress, controlled for the first time by Republicans, split thinly populated Nevada from Utah to become its own territory. Its top officials were all appointed by Lincoln. Most notable was James W. Nye, a fast-talking lawyer of dubious propriety who had been head of the New York City Metropolitan Board of Police. He was plucked by Lincoln to be the territorial governor.
Nye and his fellow Republicans immediately began agitating for statehood. But there was a small problem. An old federal law, the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, said new states had to have a population of at last 60,000. Nevada’s population at the 1860 census was 6,857, which was only 53,143 short of the mandate. Almost all of that was centered around Carson City; Las Vegas, which was still part of Arizona, did not even exist, except on government maps showing a place for gold-mad settlers to get some water in the Mojave Desert on the way to California.
But a federal law could be amended by another federal law. Especially when the Presidency was at stake.
Putting aside the population issue, any would-be state needed a constitution. So Nye convened a territorial constitutional convention. A constitution was drafted. But there were big differences over how mining–with gambling decades off, the state’s only real revenue source–would be taxed. On January 19, 1864, Nevada voters nixed the draft constitution by a lopsided vote of 8,851 to 2,157 (the population has grown but was still well short of 60,000). No constitution, no state, and thus no three electoral votes for Lincoln.
The federal election was just nine months off.
Undaunted, Nye and his crew tried again. They got some big help from Honest Abe. In Washington, D.C., the Republican-controlled Congress quickly passed, and Lincoln signed, a bill that would allow statehood for Nevada if the territory adopted a constitution and condemned slavery, no matter what the population. Also crucially, the legislation also allowed Lincoln alone, rather than the deliberative Congress, as was the practice, to declare Nevada a state.
Now, that fast-track provision and last-minute moving of goalposts (although football had not yet been invented) definitely could be called a rigging.
Back in Nevada, Nye called a second constitutional convention. A compromise was reached on mining taxation, and a new constitution was drafted. Put to the voters, it passed easily, 10,375 to 1,284.
The date was September 7, 1864. Election Day was just 62 days off.
But Nye made a big mistake. He immediately sent a copy of the constitution to Lincoln–by U.S. mail. The package never showed up. By the time its non-arrival was noticed, it was too late to resend (the transcontinental railroad going through northern Nevada was still five years away from completion).
U.S. Secretary of State William H. Seward (who a few years later would buy Alaska for the U.S.) asked Lincoln to proclaim statehood without the document in hand, but that was just too much for Lincoln, a careful lawyer. So Nye, in what has been described as the second-longest telegram ever sent, wired the entire document to the U.S. Department of State. The cost to Nevada was $4,300–$163,000 in today’s dollars.
Upon receipt, Lincoln promptly declared Nevada statehood. The date was Halloween–October 31, 1864.
The federal election was just eight days off.
On November 8, 1864, the part of the U.S. not in rebellion voted for president–including, for the first time, Nevada. By then, things had started moving in Lincoln’s way, and as it turned out, he didn’t need the newest state. Lincoln received 55% of the national popular vote and overwhelmingly won the electoral vote, 212 to 27. McClellan captured only Kentucky (where Lincoln had been born), Delaware and McClellan’s home state of New Jersey with those 13 slaves.
Lincoln handily won the popular vote in Nevada, 9,826 to 6,594. The total of 16,420 votes was the least cast in any state. (The southern tip of Nevada where Las Vegas is did not become part of the state until 1867 when Congress transferred that region from the territory of Arizona.)
But despite all that effort, Lincoln still didn’t get all of Nevada’s three electoral votes. Due to a snowstorm (Nevada, after all, is the Spanish word for “snow-covered”), one of the electors pledged to Lincoln could not make it to the state capital of Carson City a month later for the formal meeting and voting of Nevada electors. So Lincoln ended up getting two electoral votes from Nevada, but not three. (I digress, but 156 years later, Carson City was the venue for six fake electors who in 2020 improperly voted for Trump.)
For his efforts, Nye became one of Nevada’s first two senators—where he hired Mark Twain as a staffer–serving for eight years. He also got his name on Nye County, the wild, woolly, and still solidly Republican county just north and west of Las Vegas that is the country’s third largest by area. Following his Senate service, Nye moved back to New York State. He quickly was declared insane and committed to an asylum, where he was so delusional he thought he had died and was waiting for his coffin. When the casket finally arrived–after Nye expired on Christmas Day 1876 in the New York City suburb of White Plains at age 61–he was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx. One obituary said Nye had been a fine speaker with a great sense of humor but was “not over-honest.”
No fake news here.