I just began an interesting book on the 1876 presidential race between
Rutherford B. Hayes and Samuel Tilden. It was the precursor to George
Bush v Al Gore.
To any who doubt that history repeats itself, just read the account
I've reprinted from Wikipedia.
******
The United States presidential election of 1876 was the 23rd quadrennial
presidential election,
held on Tuesday, November 7, 1876. It was one of the most contentious
and controversial
presidential elections
in American history, and is known for being the catalyst for the end of
Reconstruction.
Republican
nominee
Rutherford B. Hayes
faced
Democrat
Samuel Tilden.
After a controversial post-election process, Hayes was declared the winner.
After President
Ulysses S. Grant
declined to seek a third term despite previously being expected to do
so, Congressman
James G. Blaine
emerged as the front-runner for the Republican nomination. However,
Blaine was unable to win a majority at the
1876 Republican National Convention,
which settled on Governor Hayes of Ohio as a compromise candidate. The
1876 Democratic National Convention
nominated Governor Tilden of New York on the second ballot.
The results of the election remain among the most disputed ever,
although it is not disputed that Tilden outpolled Hayes in the popular
vote. After a first
count of votes, Tilden won 184
electoral votes
to Hayes's 165, with 20 votes from four states unresolved. In the
case of Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina, each party reported
its candidate had
won the state, while in Oregon one elector was replaced after being
declared illegal for being an "elected or appointed official". The
question of who
should have been awarded these electoral votes is the source of the
continued controversy. An informal deal was struck to resolve the
dispute: the
Compromise of 1877,
which awarded all 20 electoral votes to Hayes. In return for the
Democrats' acquiescence to Hayes's election, the Republicans agreed to
withdraw federal
troops from the South, ending Reconstruction. The Compromise
effectively ceded power in the Southern states to the Democratic
Redeemers,
who proceeded to
disenfranchise black voters
in subsequent years.
The 1876 election is one of five presidential elections in which the
person who won the most popular votes did not win the election,
and the only such election in which the popular vote winner received a
majority (rather than a plurality) of the popular vote. To date, it
remains the
election that recorded the smallest
electoral vote victory
(185–184) and the election that yielded the highest
voter turnout
of the eligible
voting age population
in American history, at 81.8%.