September 7, 2012 For Rutherford B. Hayes, election evening of
November 7, 1876, was shaping up to be any presidential
candidate’s nightmare. Even though the first returns were just
coming in by telegraph, newspapers were announcing that his
opponent, the Democrat Samuel J. Tilden, had won. Hayes, a
Republican, would indeed lose the popular vote by more than a
quarter-million, but he had no way of knowing that as he
prepared his concession speech. He went to bed a gloomy man and
consoled his wife, Lucy Webb. “We soon fell into a refreshing
sleep,” Hayes wrote in his diary, “and the affair seemed over.”
But the ugliest, most contentious and most controversial
presidential election in U.S. history was far from over.
Throughout the campaign, Tilden’s opposition had called him
everything from a briber to a thief to a drunken syphilitic.
Suspicion of voter fraud in Republican-controlled states was
rampant, and heavily armed and marauding white supremacist
Democrats had canvassed the South, preventing countless bla