“I Still Trust The People” — Samuel J Tilden
There are many interesting parallels between the 1876 and 2016 presidential elections. Both had enormous impact on their times and what came after. Both had a great deal to do with race. Both where marred by chicanery and a split between the popular and electoral vote.
Coming just a few years after the Civil War the Republican Party was in power and overseeing the rehabilitation of the Confederacy (known as “Reconstruction“). Their candidate was Rutherford B. Hayes the governor of Ohio. The Democratic Party nominated Samuel J. Tilden the governor of New York (who was seen as an anti-corruption crusader).
Tilden clearly won the popular vote, but the electoral vote as contested in four states for various reasons. Ironically (from today’s perspective) the Republicans accused the Democrats of suppressing the vote of African Americans in the South.
The upshot of all this was the Compromise of 1877, an informal bit of horse-trading by Congress to give the majority of electoral votes to Hayes in return for the withdrawal of federal troops protecting the rights of former slaves in the South, thus ending Reconstruction and paving the way for the Jim Crow era to begin.