The bitter 1876 contest between Ohio Republican Governor Rutherford B. Hayes and New York Democratic Governor Samuel Tilden was the most sensational and corrupt presidential election in American history. It was also, in many ways, the final battle of the Civil War. Although Tilden received some 265,000 more popular votes than his opponent, and needed only one more electoral vote for victory, contested returns in three southern states still under Republican-controlled Reconstruction governments ultimately led to Hayes's being declared the winner after four tense months of brazen political intrigue and threats of violence that brought armed troops into the streets of the nation's capital. In this major work of popular history and scholarship, Roy Morris, Jr., takes readers to Philadelphia in America's centennial year, where millions celebrated the nation's industrial might and democratic ideals; to the nation's heartland, where Republicans refought the Civil War by waging a cynical "bloody shirt" campaign to tar the Democrats as the party of disunion and rebellion; and finally into the smoke-filled back rooms of Washington, D.C., where the will of the people was thwarted and the newly won rights of four million former slaves were ignored, leading to nearly ninety years of legalized segregation in the South.
In this major work of popular history and scholarship, acclaimed historian and biographer Roy Morris, Jr, tells the extraordinary story of how, in America's centennial year, the presidency was stolen, the Civil War was almost reignited, and Black Americans were consigned to nearly ninety years of legalized segregation in the South. The bitter 1876 contest between Ohio Republican governor Rutherford B. Hayes and New York Democratic governor Samuel J. Tilden is the most sensational, ethically sordid, and legally questionable presidential election in American history. The first since Lincoln's in 1860 in which the Democrats had a real chance of recapturing the White House, the election was in some ways the last battle of the Civil War, as the two parties fought to preserve or overturn what had been decided by armies just eleven years earlier. Riding a wave of popular revulsion at the numerous scandals of the Grant administration and a sluggish economy, Tilden received some 260,000 more votes than his opponent. But contested returns in Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina ultimately led to Hayes's being declared the winner by a specially created, Rep