Centennial Crisis
The Disputed Election of 1876
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
In the annals of presidential elections, the hotly contested 1876 race between Rutherford B. Hayes and Samuel J. Tilden was in many ways as remarkable in its time as Bush versus Gore was in ours. Chief Justice William Rehnquist offers readers a colorful and peerlessly researched chronicle of the post—Civil War years, when the presidency of Ulysses S. Grant was marked by misjudgment and scandal, and Hayes, Republican governor of Ohio, vied with Tilden, a wealthy Democratic lawyer and successful corruption buster, to succeed Grant as America’s chief executive. The upshot was a very close popular vote (in favor of Tilden) that an irremediably deadlocked Congress was unable to resolve. In the pitched battle that ensued along party lines, the ultimate decision of who would be President rested with a commission that included five Supreme Court justices, as well as five congressional members from each party. With a firm understanding of the energies that motivated the era’s movers and shakers, and no shortage of insight into the processes by which epochal decisions are made, Chief Justice Rehnquist draws the reader intimately into a nineteenth-century event that offers valuable history lessons for us in the twenty-first.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
It's fitting that Rehnquist, who as chief justice of the Supreme Court played his own role in the contested presidential election of 2000, would offer an account of a similar case 125 years earlier. But Rehnquist is a lesser narrator of popular history than he is a jurist; the only interest in this account may be his rueful regret over the lack of "tolerance" shown for political proclivities shown by the Supreme Court justices recruited to help resolve the disputed 1876 election. They were part of a commission appointed by Congress, which because of its own political division could not resolve the electoral impasse. Democratic presidential candidate Samuel Tilden won the popular majority nationwide, but fell a single vote short of the electoral majority of 185 needed to win. Republican candidate Rutherford B. Hayes took 165 electoral votes, and 20 votes were disputed 19 from three states that still had Reconstruction governments (South Carolina, Louisiana and Florida), and one from Oregon. So Congress impaneled a commission of 10 congressmen and five U.S. Supreme Court justices who, voting along party lines, awarded the presidency to Hayes. Rehnquist narrates these well-known facts in a workmanlike but uncompromisingly dry manner, adding nothing new in fact or analysis. Readers interested in the election of 1876 would do better to consult Roy B. Morris Jr.'s critically acclaimed Fraud of the Century: Rutherford B. Hayes, Samuel Tilden, and the Disputed Election of 1876, published last year. Illus. not seen by PW.
