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Other elections were contested without congressional intervention. Some Republicans suspected that John F. Kennedy’s victory in 1960 was based on fraud and have taken legal action, but Richard M. Nixon disavowed the effort. George W. Bush won the presidency over Al Gore in 2000 only after a five-week recount battle was ruled out by the Supreme Court. Four years later, some Democrats opposed voters for Mr. Bush’s re-election when Congress counted the votes, but the decision was unsuccessful and rejected by the losing candidate, John F. Kerry.
However, the 1876 fireworks were unlike any other and not just because it was the country’s centenary. Yesterday as today, the electoral conflict had its roots in a major divide in American society. Barely a decade after the end of the Civil War, the country remains fractured by geography, economy, class and above all race.
The party that ended slavery won the short-term presidency that year, but white supremacists got what they wanted in the long term by accepting defeat in exchange for ending reconstruction, scoring finally 90 years of legalized segregation and oppression. newly liberated blacks in the south.
The competition opposed two governors from the north whose fate would be decided by the southern states. Hayes, the Republican, had served as Union general during the Civil War. He fought in Antietam and was wounded four times during the conflict. A member of Congress and two-term governor of Ohio, he was a held figure, “a picture of a magic lantern without even a surface to display,” in the biting words of Ambrose Bierce, the famous soldier-turned-writer of The era.
Tilden, the Democrat, was a crusading lawyer and reformer in New York City who helped bring down Boss Tweed from Tammany Hall and make him governor. With a droopy left eyelid, he “looked like a man in desperate need of a good night’s sleep,” as Roy Morris Jr. put it in “Fraud of the Century,” his 2003 account of the electoral conflict.
The election was filled with intimidation, fraud and efforts to suppress the black vote. In Florida, where Republicans were divided among themselves, Democrats intimidated black voters and others by asking landlords, traders, doctors and lawyers to charge a 25% surtax on anyone suspected of voting Republican. The state-owned railroad has laid off workers who attended Democratic rallies. And the votes were supposed to be on sale at $ 5 each.
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