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.
