Sometimes the accusers were right. Once the votes were counted in that disputed 1876 election, it appeared that Democrat Samuel J. Tilden had won a majority in both the popular vote and the Electoral College. Hayes would not admit defeat, and his backers argued that the vote had been unfair because of massive vote fraud. Black voters had been beaten and intimidated throughout the South. In particular, the Republicans challenged the balloting in Florida, South Carolina and Louisiana.

Recounts were ordered. In South Carolina, the board of canvassers was threatened, and troops dispatched to protect them. The Tilden forces were furious. One Democratic newspaper lamented: “The character of the state government of South Carolina is so notorious that the integrity of this board will be considered absurd.”

Congress finally appointed a committee to adjudicate the matter. When Hayes supporters said the nation should abide by the outcome, whatever it was, the pro-Tilden Cincinnati Enquirer replied angrily that this argument betrayed “ignorance of the law and the Constitution.”

In the end, the committee awarded all the disputed states to Hayes, giving him the presidency by a single electoral vote, and allowing him to go down in history as the man who ended Reconstruction and left the freed slaves to the untender mercies of their former owners. The Democrats cried foul, and there is ample reason to think they were right. In fact, the battle produced a dismaying symmetry: first Tilden won by intimidation and then Hayes won by fraud.