Masked Dispatches: Cryptograms and Cryptology in American History, 1775-1900

Chapter 20. "Cipher" Dispatches and the Election of 1876

"The story told today by the translation of captured cipher dispatches is not a pleasant one for any American to read," reported a Republican newspaper, the New York Daily Tribune, on 8 October 1878. "It is a story of such disgrace and shame that we might well wish that events had not rendered its telling necessary. Every citizen must feel that it would have been better for the good name of the Republic had the contest of 1876, with all its intense passions and its crimes, been permitted to pass from memory." Directed by its famous and especially aggressive editor, Whitelaw Reid, the Tribune's journalistic crusade against alleged political corruption by the Democrats sought to uncover the ...