Essay

An Election and a Compromise
The centennial year of 1876 witnessed one of the most tumultuous elections in American history. Its chaos and confusion provided a fitting conclusion to theexperimental known as reconstruction. The election took place in November, but not until March 2 of the following year did the nation know who would be inaugurated president on March 4. The democrats nominatedNew York’s governor, Samuel J. Tilden, who immediately targeted the corruption of the Grant administration. The Republicans put forward Rutherford B. Hayes, governor of Ohio. Privately, Hayesconsidered “bayonet rule” a mistake but concluded that waving the “bloody shirt” reminding voters that Democrats were the “party of rebellion” remained the Republicans’ best political strategy.
On ElectionDay, Tilden tallied 4,288,590 votes to Hayes’s 4,036,000. But in the all-important Electoral College, Tilden fell one vote short of the majority required for victory. The electoral votes of the threestates- South Carolina, Louisiana, and Florida, the only remaining Republican governments in the south remained in doubt because both Republican and Democrats in those states claimed victory. To win,Tilden needed only one of the nineteen contested votes. Hayes had to have all of them.
Congress had to decide who had actually won the elections in the three southern states and thus who would bepresident. The constitution provided no guidance for this situation, Moreover, Democrats controlled the Senate. Congress created a special electoral commission to arbitrate the disputed returns. Allof the commissioners voted their party affiliation, giving every state to the Republican Hayes and putting him over the top electoral votes.
Some outraged democrats vowed to resist Hayes’s victory.Rumors flew of an impending coup and renewed civil war. But the impasse was broken when negotiations behind the scenes between Hayes’s lieutenants and some moderate southern Democrats resulted in an...