1876 was America's centennial year. To celebrate one hundred years of national independence the American people flocked to Philadelphia's Centennial Exposition from May to November, staged numerous parties, balls, and tableaux, and purchased untold quantities of centennial buckwheat cakes, soda pop, coffee, cigars, matches, hats, and scarves. They also held the longest, bitterest, and most controversial presidential election in American history. By the end of the year people were wondering whether the election dispute would produce another civil war. There was a fervent centennial prayer: "God save the republic!"

For centennial candidates the Republicans and Democrats both picked governors with reputations for honesty and integrity. The "Old Man," as Grant was called, wanted a third term, but the stench of "Grantism" was still so strong that most Republican wheelhorses categorically ruled him out. James G. Blaine, the "Magnetic Statesman" from Maine, also badly wanted to run, but unsavory connections with the Little Rock and Fort Smith Railroad made him an embarrassment to the party too. In the end, the Republicans, meeting in Cincinnati in mid-June, turned to Rutherford B. Hayes, fifty-three, Ohio Governor friendly to civil-service reform, on the seventh ballot, picked New York Congressman William A. Wheeler to go with him, and put together a platform decrying the spoils system and holding public officials "to a rigid responsibility."

The Democrats, meeting in St. Louis late in June, had an obvious choice: Samuel J. Tilden of New York. As District Attorney, Tilden had sent Boss William Tweed and his cronies to jail; and as Governor he had smashed the crooked Canal Ring. Though not every Democrat liked him, they all realized that a "reform campaign without Tilden would be like the play of Hamlet with Hamlet left out." The convention nominated him for President on the first ballot, chose Thomas A. Hendricks of Indiana as their vice-presidential nominee, and adopted a platform calling for the end of Reconstruction, civil service reform, and the installation of "honest men" in government.

Hayes and Tilden agreed on major issues: hard money, withdrawing federal troops from the South, and civil-service reform. The Republicans cried, "Hurrah! For Hayes and Honest Ways!" and the Democrats chanted, "Tilden and Reform!" But despite the similarities of the candidates the campaign was acrimonious and at times unseemly. The Democrats had an embarrassment of riches to exploit during the campaign: the scandals of the Grant administration, the hard times following the Panic of 1873, and revelations of corruption in the carpetbag governments remaining in the South. But the Republicans could still count on the Civil War issue; their view was that "not every Democrat was a Rebel, but every Rebel was a Democrat."' As freethinker Robert G. Ingersoll, stumping the country for Hayes, put it in what Republicans called the greatest speech of the campaign: "Every man that endeavored to tear the old flag from the heavens that it enriches was a Democrat. Every man that tried to destroy this nation was a Democrat... The man that assassinated Abraham Lincoln was a Democrat... Soldiers, every scar you have on your heroic bodies was given you by a Democrat!"

Republican orators assaulted Tilden with fury. They accused him of evading taxes, praising slavery, making millions as attorney for robber barons like Jim Fisk, coddling corruptionists in New York City's Tammany Hall, and planning to pay off the Confederate debt if he became President. But the Democrats thought up some lies too: that Hayes stole the pay of dead soldiers in his Civil War regiment, cheated Ohio out of vast sums of money while Governor, and shot his mother "in a fit of insanity." Tilden disapproved of' smear tactics in political campaigns, but his high-mindedness did him no good. Before the campaign was over he had been called a thief, liar, drunkard, syphilitic, and swindler. The nicknames were nasty: Slippery Sammy, Soapy Sam, Ananias Tilden. One campaign book dismissed him as a criminal, a disgrace to New York State, and "a menace to the United States."

When the mud-slinging ended and the voters registered their choices on November 7, it looked as though Tilden had won. Acknowledged the devoutly Republican Indianapolis journal sorrowfully the following morning: "With the result before us at this writing we see no escape from the conclusion that Tilden and Hendricks are elected... The announcement will carry pain to every loyal heart in the nation, but the inevitable truth may as well be stated." Tilden received a quarter of a million more popular votes than Hayes (about 4,300,000 to 4,036,000) and 184 electoral votes to Hayes's 165, only one short of, Victory. Twenty electoral votes (South Carolina's 7, Louisiana's 8, Florida's 4, and one of Oregon's 3) were in doubt; Tilden needed only one of them to win while Hayes needed all twenty.

Tilden was sure he had won, and Hayes himself retired election night thinking he had lost. Then Zachariah Chandler, chairman of the Republican national committee, and some of his associates in New York went into action. Not only did they claim Oregon's three votes; they also resolved to secure the votes of South Carolina, Louisiana, and Florida, still under carpetbag rule, for Hayes. To Republican officials in the three carpetbag states they sent telegrams telling them, "Hayes is elected if we have carried South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana," and asking, "Can you hold your state? Answer at once." The following afternoon Chandler made an audacious public statement: "Hayes has 185 electoral votes and is elected." Soon "visiting statesmen" representing both parties were headed southward to look into the situation. On November 10 President Grant sent more troops into the three states "to preserve peace and good order, and to see that the proper and legal Boards of Canvasses are unmolested in the performance of their duties."

The struggle over the twenty disputed electoral votes lasted from November 8, 1876, until March 2, 1877, and at times threatened to end in violence. Only one of the disputed votes-Oregon's-was clearly Hayes's. In Oregon, a majority of the people had voted Republican; but one of the three electors, J. W. Watts, was declared ineligible because he was a postmaster and the U. S. Constitution forbids federal officeholders from serving as electors. At the prompting of Abram Hewitt, chairman of the Democratic national committee, Oregon's Democratic Governor replaced Watts with a Democrat and sent one Tilden and two Hayes votes to Washington. Meanwhile Watts resigned his job, met with the other Republican electors, and the three of them forwarded three Hayes votes to the national capital. Hewitt admitted that Hayes deserved all three votes; but the Democrats had to claim one of them, he explained, to "offset the palpable frauds" going on in Louisiana, Florida, and South Carolina.

Hewitt was right about the frauds. In all three Southern states the voting had been accompanied by bribery, forgery, violence, intimidation, and ballot-box stuffing. Democrats "bulldozed" or intimidated black voters to keep them away from the polls; Republican officials, backed by federal troops, saw to it that as many blacks as possible voted, sometimes more than once. It is difficult to say who would have won in a free and fair election; but it is probably safe to conclude that the Republicans won a majority in South Carolina and that the Democrats carried both Louisiana and Florida. Soon after the election, agents of both parties, with promises to make and money to spend, appeared on the scene to press their claims. The upshot: two sets of returns, one for Hayes and one for Tilden, were sent to Washington from Louisiana and South Carolina, and three sets (two for Tilden and one for Hayes) came in from Florida.

It was now up to Congress to decide which sets of returns from the four disputed states were valid. The Constitution states that "the president of the Senate shall, in the presence of the Senate and the House of Representatives, open all certificates, and the votes shall then be counted," but does not outline procedures in case of conflicting returns from any state. The House of Representatives, with a Democratic majority since 1874, balked at letting the president of the Senate, controlled by the Republicans, make the decisions; but the Republican Senate was equally opposed to throwing the final decision about the election into the Democratic House of Representatives. After weeks of acrimonious debate, the two houses finally agreed to set up an Electoral Commission to decide which candidate had won the disputed votes. The Commission was composed of five Senators, five Representatives, and five Supreme Court justices; seven of them were Republicans and seven Democrats. The fifteenth member was to be Justice David Davis, regarded as an independent, but at the last minute he was elected to the U. S. Senate by the Illinois legislature and became ineligible. Justice Joseph Bradley took his place; though a Republican, he was expected to maintain some semblance of nonpartisanship. But he didn't; he ended up voting with his Republican colleagues on every crucial issue. The result was that by a vote of eight to seven, the Electoral Commission awarded all the disputed electoral votes to Hayes, giving him 185 votes to Tilden's 184, and making him President.

Many Democrats, especially in the North, were outraged by the work of the Electoral Commission. The Cincinnati Enquirer called it "the monster fraud of the century," the New York Sun put black borders on its pages to mourn the demise of democracy, and a Washington paper even suggested doing away with Hayes. "Fraud has triumphed, and triumphed through the treachery of Democrats," cried the Washington Union, a Tilden campaign paper. "Honest men or irresolute nature and dull perceptions have assisted, but corruption led the way." In the House of Representatives the Democrats passed a resolution over Republican opposition proclaiming that Tilden had been "duly elected President of the United States"; and in eleven states Democrats began organizing "Tilden-Hendricks Minute-Men" clubs, arming themselves with rifles, and shouting, "On to Washington!" and "Tilden or blood!"

Tilden did not encourage resistance to the Electoral Commission's decision; and Southern Democrats remained on the whole conciliatory. Southern whites knew that Hayes was friendly to them and that in his letter accepting the Republican nomination he had recommended ending military reconstruction. Who knows? Perhaps Southern businessmen, many of them former Whigs, could get more out of a Republican President than out of Tilden, a penny pincher, whose slogan was "Retrenchment and Reform." At a series of secret meetings while the Electoral Commission was still at work, Southern Democratic leaders reached a compromise with Northern Republicans: they agreed to accept the decision of the Electoral Commission in return for pledges that Hayes would pull federal troops out of Louisiana and South Carolina (the two remaining Republican carpetbag governments), appoint at least one Southerner to his Cabinet, and support federal aid to education and internal improvements for the South. The Compromise of 1877, as the informal understanding came to be called, killed all suggestions for a filibuster by the Democrats in Congress and ended the crisis. On the morning of March 2, Senator Thomas W. Ferry of Michigan, the president of the Senate (Vice-President Henry Wilson had died), made the announcement: "Rutherford B. Hayes, having received the majority of the whole number of electoral votes, is duly elected President of the United States for four years commencing on the 4th of March, 1877."

Not all Democrats were reconciled. Some of them contemptuously dismissed Hayes as "Rutherfraud Hayes, "the Fraudulent President," the "Usurper," "the Boss Thief," and "Old 8 to 7." Tilden himself acquiesced in the decision for Hayes, but to the end of his life believed he had been the real winner. In the spring of 1878 the House of Representatives launched an investigation of the election which brought to light flagrant instances of Republican bribery in the South; but revelations that Tilden men had also made bribe offers blunted the committee's findings to some extent.

Meanwhile Hayes buried the bloody shirt: withdrew the last of the federal troops from the South, appointed David M. Key, a Tennessee Democrat, as Postmaster General, appointed many Southern Democrats to local offices, and approved so many appropriations for internal improvements in the South that Northern Republicans began complaining. He was, exulted some Democrats, "the greatest Southerner of the day." Reconstruction came to an end with Hayes. So did federal concern for black civil rights. "The Negro will disappear from the field of national politics," predicted the Nation. "Henceforth the nation, as a nation, will have nothing more to do with him."

Source: Paul F. Boller Jr., Presidential Campaigns (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 133-35.