Other elections were contested without Congressional intervention. Some Republicans suspected that John F. Kennedy’s 1960 victory was based on fraud and lawsuits, but Richard M. Nixon denied the effort. George W. Bush won the presidency over Al Gore in 2000 only after a five-week recount battle was decided by the Supreme Court. Four years later, some Democrats objected to voters for Bush’s re-election when Congress counted the votes, but the measure was unsuccessful and denied by the defeated candidate, John F. Kerry.
The fireworks of 1876, however, were like no other and not only because it was the country’s centenary. Then, as now, the electoral dispute was rooted in a major divide in American society. Almost a decade after the end of the Civil War, the country remained divided by geography, economy, class and mainly race.
The party that ended slavery won the presidency in the short term that year, but white supremacists got what they wanted in the long run by agreeing to accept defeat in return for the end of Reconstruction, ushering in 90 years of legalized segregation and oppression of newly freed Negroes in the south.
The dispute faced two northern governors whose fate would be decided by the southern states. Hayes, the Republican, served as a Union general in the Civil War. He fought in Antietam and was wounded four times during the conflict. A two-term congressman and three-term governor of Ohio, he was a contained figure, “an image of a magic lantern without even a surface to display,” in the sharp words of Ambrose Bierce, the famous soldier who became a writer for was.
Tilden, the Democrat, was a lawyer and reformist in the New York crusades who helped topple Tammany Hall’s Boss Tweed and turned it into government. With his left eyelid drooping, he “looked like a man who desperately needed a good night’s sleep”, as Roy Morris Jr. said in “Fraud of the Century”, his 2003 account of the electoral dispute.
The election was fraught with intimidation, fraud and efforts to suppress the black vote. In Florida, where Republicans were divided among themselves, Democrats intimidated black and other voters by causing landlords, shopkeepers, doctors and lawyers to charge a 25% surcharge on anyone suspected of voting for the Republican. The state railway sacked officials who attended Democratic rallies. And the votes were for sale for $ 5 each.