The shattering and heartrending assassination of President Abraham Lincoln in April 1865 thrust Vice President Andrew Johnson of Tennessee into the White House, making Johnson the third vice president to assume the office of the presidency upon his predecessor’s death. Lincoln placed Johnson on the 1864 ticket as part of an effort to cement the alliance between Republicans and Peace Democrats, resulting in the formation of the Union Party. Had Lincoln kept his first vice president, Maine’s Hannibal Hamlin, on the ticket in 1864, a Radical Republican instead would have ascended to the presidency, an event that no doubt would have resulted in a dramatically different approach to Reconstruction. The Radical Republicans were already a driving force, and it was Lincoln who had supplied the voice of moderation, a voice that for some was too cautious, too compromising, too gradualist. Lincoln’s vision involved a quick and thorough reconciliation with the defeated rebels and a full restoration of the former Confederate states to the Union, where they belonged. Lincoln remained committed to freedom for the emancipated slaves, but he was not interested in punitive measures against his old foes, for whom he had always felt responsible as their legitimate president. “With malice toward none,” Lincoln instructed in his second inaugural address, “with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”
President Lincoln’s “new birth of freedom,” as affirmed two years earlier in his Gettysburg Address, meant the abolition of slavery for good and all, but it did not mean vengeance upon the South. Both sides in the war, Lincoln noted in his second inaugural, shared mutual responsibility for all that had transpired, for in his view, it was the very will of God that gave “to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came.” Guilt for the sin of slavery was shared equally by the entire Union, all sections, and the only sure way to a restored republic was through dignified policies of charity, forgiveness, and mutual understanding. This understanding was also shared by Vice President Johnson, a Southerner and War Democrat who was invested in a lenient approach to the former rebels, and in this sense he carried forward Lincoln’s desires. Johnson wished to follow Lincoln’s plans for establishing amenable conditions hastening the South’s full return to the Union. In sharp contrast, Radical Republicans, for various reasons, sought to impose numerous and more stringent requirements for readmission on the rebellious states.
However, Johnson, while more or less intending to follow the slain president’s policy of swift reconciliation, was far less sympathetic than the Great Emancipator to the improvement of the position of the freedmen (i.e., recently emancipated slaves), thus putting him at odds with both the memory of Lincoln, who was now viewed as a martyred hero, and the Radical Republicans. President Johnson was unresponsive, watching with indifference as southern state governors whom he had recently appointed began to institute racist policies and practices, known as “black codes.” To counter the black codes, congressional Republicans, both moderates and radicals, renewed and buttressed the Freedman’s Bureau to assist all former slaves and, significantly, proposed civil rights legislation before Congress on behalf of the newly freed African Americans in an effort to protect their rights. President Johnson vetoed both the renewal of the Freedman’s Bureau and the civil rights bill, reactionary moves that never would have occurred under President Lincoln. In rejecting the civil rights bill, Johnson’s veto message asserted that such legislation was an undue encroachment on state power by the federal government, an early example of what would eventually become the all-too-common use of the states’ rights argument against future civil rights legislation. For President Johnson, there was no discernible constitutional ground for such legislation, and it would only encourage a centralized federal government, to the detriment of the states. Additionally, the president wrote in his veto message, “In all our history . . . no such system as that contemplated by the details of this bill has ever before been proposed or adopted. [The bill establishes] for the security of the colored race safeguards which go beyond any that the General Government has ever provided for the white race.” More telling, in a letter to Missouri’s governor, Thomas Fletcher, Johnson candidly wrote, “This is a country for white men, and as long as I am president, it shall be a government for white men.” This attitude won him no friends in Congress, where a much different and more thoroughgoing approach to Reconstruction animated several of its more powerful members. Johnson’s veto was promptly overridden, and Republicans of all stripes abandoned him; while Democrats, especially in the South, now embraced him. It is no stretch of the imagination to realize that these events are far from what the late President Lincoln had envisioned for the postwar reconciliation.
The conditions were in place for a grim confrontation between the executive and legislative branches. Congress was determined to act, and it moved to impeach Johnson in an immediate response to a controversy over the removal of Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, which was viewed as a defiant violation of the recently passed (again over Johnson’s veto) Tenure of Office Act (1867). But this was in reality but a pretext; Congress had the Johnson administration in its crosshairs almost from the beginning. As a result of this controversy, the president was in fact impeached by the House (the first president to be so impeached; President Bill Clinton would also be impeached in 1998), but the Senate fell one vote short of conviction and removal from office. Johnson survived the impeachment move, but his presidency was in effect dead in the water, his prospects in the Union Party finished. With Johnson hobbled as a lame duck, the Republicans, now formally operating under the name of the National Union Republican Party, began a search for a candidate who would be more compliant with the agenda of the party’s radical wing and the revolutionary party platform of 1864, a platform that had been endorsed by President Lincoln.
Ohio’s Benjamin F. Wade, who, as president pro tempore of the Senate, was just one senatorial vote against Johnson from becoming the nation’s president, was regarded by some as an early front-runner. But his age (sixty-seven at the time of the president’s impeachment) was a significant disadvantage. Additionally, Chief Justice Salmon Chase, Speaker of the House Schuyler Colfax, and the eminent Charles Francis Adams, scion of the United States’ most famous political family at the time and currently assigned as foreign minister to Great Britain, were other prominent names mentioned as possible candidates for the Campaign of 1868.
More significantly, the mood in the country tilted toward men of valor, and in the wake of the war, there was a surplus of war heroes and generals, the most prominent being General Ulysses S. Grant of Ohio. Other military leaders were mentioned, such as General William T. Sherman, Admiral David G. Farragut, and even General George McClellan, the man who had opposed Lincoln in 1864; but none of these other figures could match Grant in popularity. Grant had even been considered by a small minority of Republicans in the previous election as a possible replacement for Lincoln, but at the time Grant had exhibited no interest in political office, and Lincoln shook off doubts about his potential for reelection to secure that nomination with ease. Grant’s political affiliations were vague—before the war, he had supported the Democrats and had voted for the Doughface James Buchanan in 1856—and because of his reputation as a wartime commander, he appealed to both parties. This reputation was solidified, especially for Republicans, when he refused to cooperate with President Johnson’s attempt to have him appointed as Secretary Stanton’s replacement during the controversy that directly led to the president’s impeachment. Some Democrats, however, criticized Grant for refusing Johnson, a development that helped to prod him toward the Republicans. Grant had also been critical of slavery prior to the outbreak of war, and in American politics at that time, the Republican Party had become the political home of the antislavery factions. Grant had at every turn remained indifferent to ambitions for civil office, which only served to strengthen his appeal. More than any candidate, Grant drew the admiration of the broader electorate and thus was immediately identified as a formidable political force.
The National Union Republican Convention was held in Chicago in May 1868. The usual factions—moderates and Radical Republicans as well as former War Democrats—participated, and they were also joined by Southern Unionists who had remained loyal to the North throughout the war, as well as a few repentant former Confederates. Significantly, the convention included a dozen African Americans serving as delegates from the South, a visible sign of the changes brought to the South through Reconstruction policies. Grant was unanimously nominated without opposition on the first ballot. For the vice presidency, 11 different candidates received votes, including former vice president Hannibal Hamlin (vice president during President Lincoln’s first term), who won as many as 30 votes on the second ballot. But in the end, his support was weak: the candidates that received the most votes were Benjamin Wade, the early favorite, winning a plurality of 147 votes on the first ballot, gaining votes on all subsequent ballots, peaking at 207 votes, and holding the lead on the first four ballots; Henry Wilson of Massachusetts, who peaked at 119 votes on the first ballot; Robert E. Fenton of New York, who won as many as 144 votes on the second and fourth ballots; and Speaker Colfax, who came in fourth place with 115 votes on the first ballot, but who steadily gained votes on every ballot until, finally on the fifth ballot, he won enough to secure the nomination, taking 226 delegates to 201 for Wade, 139 for Fenton, 56 for Wilson, and 20 for Hamlin. With Colfax’s victory secured, a “second fifth ballot” was cast, this time with 541 delegates throwing their votes behind the winner. Colfax would become the first person to serve as both Speaker of the House and vice president, an achievement matched only by John Nance Garner, who would be vice president under President Franklin Roosevelt.
Both Grant, from Ohio, and Colfax, from Indiana, were Midwesterners, a sign that the party was, at least for this election, uninterested in sectional balance. Additionally, both Grant and Colfax were young by presidential standards, Grant being forty-six and Colfax forty-five, the youngest combined ticket to date. Younger men had been nominated for both offices, but no combination of candidates had been this youthful, at least by the standards of the times. Only the nomination of Bill Clinton and Al Gore in 1992 would promote a younger combination of candidates for a presidential ticket.
Framed by the slogan, “Let us have peace,” taken from Grant’s letter of acceptance, the Republican platform affirmed congressional control over Reconstruction, demanding equal political rights for all. Foreshadowing the emergence of the currency issue as one of the most contested policy areas during the post-Civil War period, the Republican Party adopted a hard-money currency position that opposed the printing of large numbers of greenbacks (paper money), a method that had been designed to permit debtors to pay back their debts with cheaper money, and one that ran against Republican instincts. The Republican platform also called for the restoration of citizenship rights to those former rebels who were fully cooperating with Republican Reconstruction efforts.
The Democrats came to the election of 1868 facing many difficult challenges. Southern Democrats were demoralized by the legacy of defeat, stained by accusations of treason, insulted by Reconstruction, burdened with a war-wrecked economy, wounded in their pride, and pained by the memories of slavery. Northern Democrats were, rightly or wrongly, associated with a lack of resolve during the Civil War and viewed by many as having been overly sympathetic to the Confederate cause, a charge that was in some instances justified, namely with regard to many of the former Copperheads. There were Democrats at the convention, such as the defiant Nathan Bedford Forrest of Tennessee, a founding member of the Ku Klux Klan, who vociferously resisted Reconstruction. The party needed to regroup, and in so doing, it attempted to move beyond the old attitudes behind the defense of slavery and the attempt at secession. The Democrats worked for the complete restoration of all former Confederate states as equal partners of the Union (four states at the time still remained under martial law—Virginia, Texas, Florida, and Mississippi—and thus would not able to participate in the election of 1868), general amnesty for all former Confederates, the return of suffrage regulations to the states themselves (prompted by racially charged concerns over the growing influence of freed African American voters within the South), and the abolition of the Freedmen’s Bureau as well as more ordinary policy concerns such as elimination of the public debt, frugality in federal allocations, policies indicative of soft-money/pro-greenback positions, sympathy for and protection of the rights of labor, reduction of the military, and the correction of government corruption.
The Democratic Party was vocally critical of the “unparalleled oppression and tyranny” of the Radical Republicans, and the Democrats sought to offer themselves as a repudiation of what they saw as the more extreme elements driving the policies and practices behind Reconstruction. The platform attacked the Radicals, accusing them of subjecting “ten States, in time of profound peace, to military despotism and Negro supremacy.” Included among anti-Reconstruction invective was an accusation by Democrats claiming that the Republicans were attempting to “Africanize” the South at the expense of white citizens and their heritage.
With their agenda in place, the Democrats needed a viable candidate to meet the challenge of the powerful Grant-Colfax ticket, a tall order for a party that had recently undergone a crisis of leadership. Curiously, Chief Justice Chase, a former ally of President Lincoln, prominent Republican, and former Free Soiler, was viewed by some as a potential Democratic candidate, and one who was evidently prepared to switch parties not out of any ideological sentiment, but rather as a means to fulfill a long-unsatisfied desire of achieving the White House. Chase seemed to be a strong candidate, as he agreed with a number of the Democrats’ proposals; nonetheless, as a veteran of both the Free Soil and Republican parties, he was committed to universal suffrage, which was enough to cause alarm among most Southern Democrats, who were bent on retracting voting rights for the freed slaves. Thus a second candidate was sought and seemed to be available in George H. Pendleton of Ohio, a widely respected figure who had stood as the party’s candidate for the vice presidency on the McClellan ticket four years earlier. Pendleton held strong support in the Midwest and the border states, but Eastern politicians distrusted him due to his former association with the Copperheads as well as his soft-money proclivities.
To complicate matters further, President Johnson, spurned by the Union Republicans, now sought to return to the Democratic fold, and he enjoyed some early support in gratitude for his lenient attitudes toward former Confederates as well as for his remarks on the status of freed blacks. But he was hampered by a lack of political connections and in the end drew only a few supporters; he had burned too many bridges and was now a politician adrift. Other candidates included Kentucky’s Francis Preston Blair Jr., a more viable name than Johnson but not as strong as Pendleton; and General Winfield S. Hancock, as well as General McClellan, the Democrats’ standard-bearer in 1864, were offered as military heroes to counter Grant, but McClellan was less than lukewarm at the prospect of another political campaign, and Hancock, while popular among Democrats, could not begin to match Grant’s overall appeal throughout the North and the West.
With no decisive choice on the horizon, another candidate soon emerged—party chairman and former governor of New York Horatio Seymour, a former Peace Democrat and party stalwart considered by most to be a political moderate. Seymour had been mentioned as a possible candidate in the previous election, but he demurred, a reaction that he repeated throughout the weeks leading up to the convention. In fact, he was insistent in his reluctance, but his popularity across the party soon translated into enough momentum on his behalf to make it difficult for him to refuse. Of all the candidates, he had the fewest enemies and the most consistent record as a tireless worker for the Democratic cause. Long before he resigned himself to the forces behind his nomination, party leaders canvassed delegates for Seymour, so that by the time the convention convened, Seymour’s name was implicitly considered to be among the front-runners. Personally, Seymour preferred Chase, but his attempts to deflect attention away from himself and to Chase failed. Pendleton himself publicly held Seymour in high regard, a sentiment that did not go unnoticed. Still, Seymour genuinely did not want the nomination, and he did his best to prevent it.
Initially, nineteen names were in play (not counting Seymour, who refused to acknowledge his candidacy), and among the official front-runners were Pendleton, Hancock, Johnson, Senator Thomas Hendricks of Indiana, Sanford E. Church, a favorite son of New York, and Asa Parker of Pennsylvania, a railroad entrepreneur and founder of Lehigh College. Also among the wide field were Chase (who showed poorly on every ballot), former War Democrat Joel Parker of New Jersey, James English and Thomas Seymour of Connecticut, General McClellan, John Quincy Adams II (son of Charles Adams and grandson of John Quincy Adams), and former president Franklin Pierce. From among the field of 19 candidates, Pendleton managed to gather 105 delegates to support him on the first ballot, a number that made him the front-runner by a considerable amount and that steadily increased for eight ballots, peaking at 156 before dropping to 144 on the ninth, the beginning of a decline that indicated a deadlocked convention. By the sixteenth ballot, Pendleton lost his status as front-runner to Hancock, who outpolled him 113 to 107 and then peaked on the eighteenth ballot by winning 144 votes. Johnson never received more than 65 votes (enjoyed on the first and second ballots), and the only other candidate to receive more than 100 votes after 22 ballots was Hendricks, who won 107 on the nineteenth ballot to peak at 145 on the twenty-second, at which point he suddenly became the front-runner. But it was to no avail, as his newly found status at the top of the field was still far from the two-thirds majority needed to earn the nomination.
On the fourth ballot, the field was expanded to 20 as Seymour received 9 unwelcomed votes from North Carolina, prompting him to temporarily leave the chair and deliver an impromptu speech reminding the delegates that he did not seek nomination. Convention delegates resisted casting any votes for Seymour through the next 17 ballots, but with the deadlock so evidently solidified, 22 delegates ignored Seymour’s appeal and cast their votes in his direction. This time Seymour reluctantly accepted what had become a fait accompli and allowed his name to come forward. The twenty-second ballot was recast, and Seymour won all 317 votes. Wearied by the deadlocked presidential contest, the convention proceeded to unanimously nominate Blair for the vice presidency. Blair was a strident critic of Reconstruction and convinced that the white race was endangered by the enfranchisement of the freed slaves, whom he considered to be a “semi-barbarous race.” Such attitudes were somewhat incongruous, given his family background (his father, Francis Sr., had supported both Free Soil and, later on, Republican causes before eventually returning to the Democratic fold; and his brother, Montgomery Blair, was an abolitionist and Lincoln loyalist), and decidedly impolitic, ultimately causing harm to the Democratic ticket.
Throughout the general campaign, Democrats persistently demanded the end of Reconstruction and the full restoration of rights to former rebels who had been stripped of their franchise and qualifications for office. Republicans remained steadfast in their support of the franchise for blacks. Incorporating the far-seeing resolutions of the Union League of America, an ardent pro-Union, pro-Lincoln organization that was formed in 1862, into their party platform, the Republicans declared that African Americans “had justified the reposing in their hands the highest boon of an American citizen, the ballot, and illustrated the truth that it is eminently wise and always safe to act with equity and justice to all men, without regard to race or color.” In a famous speech, Robert G. Ingersoll of Maine asked, “Is not a negro who is an honor to the black race, better than a white man who is a disgrace to the white race?” Democrats countered these efforts by becoming even more vehemently opposed to the suffrage of African Americans. Southern journalists and politicians claimed that the African race was naturally inferior, lacking both the intelligence and character to participate in political life. Northern Democrats were not immune to such attitudes. The New York Herald criticized the Republicans’ attachment to the cause of the franchise for blacks, even claiming a correlation between the improvement of conditions for African Americans and the growing oppression of whites, and doing so all the while by employing racist epithets. In a sense, the Civil War was still being fought, but now through the political process and within the opinion pages of the press over the fate of African Americans and their role in the future political direction of the republic. However, politics in the United States is seldom that simple; some Democrats recognized what Republicans had already realized: that the new “Negro vote” might be an untapped political resource. Democrats in Nashville made an appeal to the newly enfranchised by trying to convince them that the values represented by the Democratic Party were in fact closer to their interests as new citizens than those of the Republican Party.
Typically, the requisite mudslinging soon materialized. Democrats accused Grant of being a drunken, opportunistic, cold-hearted butcher. He was also accused of being an anti-Semite, an indictment that stemmed from Grant’s actions as commander of the 13th Army Corps during the war. In December 1862, General Grant issued an order to expel Jewish citizens from the military district that he oversaw at the time, an area that included Tennessee, Mississippi, and Kentucky, based on a suspicion that Jewish merchants were supporting an underground market in the region. Responding to direct appeals from the Jewish community, President Lincoln revoked Grant’s order, and historians are still unclear as to whether or not Grant was fully responsible for the incident. Nonetheless, Grant admitted responsibility, thus tainting with anti-Semitic overtones his record of tolerance. His running mate, Colfax, was also attacked, depicted as an office-grubbing and self-serving “politician by trade,” and he was accused of having once been an anti-Catholic Know-Nothing, an indictment that appeared to hold a grain of truth, given that Colfax, a former Whig, was tempted to join the American Party upon the collapse of the Whig Party.
Seymour, while generally well liked within the party, was not immune to smear tactics. In the aftermath of the war, Republicans were prone to associating the Democratic Party as a whole with treason and rebellion, and they were not above questioning Seymour’s loyalty, claiming that his wartime tenure as Democratic governor of New York was suspiciously cozy with elements among the Copperheads. Seymour became a target of the political cartoonist Thomas Nast, who drew for the popular Harper’s Weekly and whose efforts would result in the introduction of cartooning as a major force in presidential politics and an important development in the evolution of presidential campaign politics. Nast portrayed Seymour as the instigator of the 1863 New York City draft riots, which led to numerous deaths and the destruction of large amounts of property. Nast and others alleged that Seymour had addressed the anti-draft rioters as “My Friends.” Nast also used his cartoons to tie the Democratic Party to Forrest and the Ku Klux Klan. Seymour’s running mate was another matter; he was far more vulnerable to smear tactics than Seymour. Blair was accused of being a drunk and a thief. Worse, untoward comments made by Blair recommending the nullification of Reconstruction and rashly calling for another war simply could not be answered. With the outlook dismal, Seymour felt compelled to go on the stump, touring several northern cities, a tactic that was seen as inconsonant with his good reputation. It also did not help that Seymour proved to be an awkward campaigner.
Given Blair’s comments and Seymour’s ineffective activity on the campaign trail, rumors about a movement to reconvene another convention to replace Seymour with Chase simmered but were eventually cooled. However, the damage to Seymour’s candidacy had been done; Blair was a liability, and Seymour could not muster the skills needed to compensate. But the Democrats as a group were the more vulnerable target, and direct attacks against the candidates were not really necessary. “Scratch a Democrat and you will find a rebel” became a familiar accusatory refrain directed to Southern politicians. Massachusetts Radical Republican Benjamin Butler intensified the drama of the campaign by publicly exhibiting and waving the blood-stained garment of an unfortunate victim of the Ku Klux Klan. “Waving the Bloody Shirt” would henceforth become a visceral and recurring anti-Southern image in subsequent nineteenth-century campaigns.
To his credit, Grant remained above the fray throughout the campaign. Following the standard practice of nineteenth-century presidential candidates, Grant relied on surrogates to stump for him, choosing to spend most of his time receiving supporters in his home in Galena, Illinois, and committing himself to a few modest trips to his native Ohio, Missouri, Kentucky, and Denver in the Colorado Territory. On his way to Denver, he joined generals Sherman and Sheridan at Omaha, the three war heroes touring the West to popular acclaim.
Most importantly, the Campaign of 1868 was marked by the beginnings of antiblack violence in the South. Moderate Democrats were, as noted above, working to win the African American vote, but other elements sought to thwart efforts to enfranchise the emancipated slaves. Some Democratic candidates were warning African Americans away from the polls, and the Ku Klux Klan and similar terrorist groups employed violence against African Americans throughout the South; assaults became more frequent, often resulting in serious wounding and even death. These brutal tactics of intimidation, as bad as they were in 1868, would become even more pervasive and grave in the elections that followed. Lynching victimized both blacks and whites over the next few decades, grievously impairing the equal enforcement of the law and the progress of political democratization envisioned by the authors of the first civil rights legislation. Against the current of violent racism, the black vote, however whittled down by post-Reconstruction tactics effectively aimed at disenfranchisement, would subsequently remain Republican for six more decades. Against the currents of reaction, African Americans managed to participate in Republican politics in spite of the institutionalized discrimination against them, and they would continue the custom of sending delegates to Republican conventions.
Even though the campaign went badly for the Democrats, the demographics of electoral politics kept them in the race. The party held a monopoly among the white majority in the South, as no white Southerner would entertain even the thought of voting for the Party of Lincoln, and the minority African American vote, which was loyal to the Republicans, was not enough to counter the huge advantage held by the Democrats in the former Confederacy, with or without the criminal efforts to disenfranchise black voters. Democrats also managed to retain some loyalty within the urban North, a legacy of machine politics that began to take hold before the war and that gave Democrats some hope that they might crack the Republicans’ Northern stronghold. By Election Day, the outcome was uncertain, even though Grant was clearly the more compelling candidate. But any uncertainties were soon dispelled as Grant easily won the popular vote, earning over 3,000,000 votes, more than any candidate in the history of presidential elections. Seymour did surprisingly well, winning just over 2,700,000 votes, or about 47 percent to Grant’s 53 percent majority. The Electoral College was another matter, with Grant taking 214 electors, or 72 percent, to Seymour’s 80. Seymour won just 8 states to Grant’s 26, suffering a crushing defeat. However, the party held out some hope. Seymour did manage to win New York, which at the time had the highest number of electoral votes (33), as well as taking New Jersey’s 7 and Oregon’s 3. The Democrats also came close to winning in California, losing by a narrow margin and thus again showing surprising support in the Pacific West. The rest of Seymour’s support came from the South and the border states, but the fact that he won New York and New Jersey, and barely lost in California, indicated that the Democratic Party, while clearly the minority party in the postwar era, was more resilient than expected and could possibly regain some cross-regional support. Republicans dismissed the Democrats’ strong showing in New York, blaming their loss in the Empire State on allegations of voter fraud committed by New York City’s famed political machine, Tammany Hall.
The Republican electoral victory instilled within the Republican Congress the confidence to pass the Fifteenth Amendment, which prohibited states from denying African American males the right to vote because of their race or color. By March 1870, the Fifteenth Amendment became law after a sufficient number of states ratified the amendment. Texas, Florida, Virginia, and Mississippi were readmitted into the Union as full partners following their respective ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment as well as amendments to their state constitutions guaranteeing universal male suffrage. Despite the ratification of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, support for continued military occupation of the South and the implementation of Reconstruction policies would gradually decline within the Republican Party, thereby presenting a serious political challenge for Republicans in their Northern electoral base and new opportunities for the Democratic Party to continue to reassert and redefine itself outside the South. In the meantime, the Republicans would be prevented from making any inroads into the South for at least another century. The Republican Party would continue to dominate presidential politics throughout the remainder of the nineteenth century, but it could and would be challenged by a resurgent rival.
Coleman, Charles H. The Election of 1868: The Democratic Effort to Regain Control. New York: Columbia University Press, 1933.
Franklin, John Hope. “Election of 1868.” In Arthur M. Schlesinger, Fred Israel, and William P. Hansen, eds. History of American Presidential Elections, 1789–1968. Vol. 2. New York: Chelsea House, 1985.
Simpson, Brooks D. Let Us Have Peace: Ulysses S. Grant and the Politics of War and Reconstruction 1861–1868. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991.
Trefousse, Hans L. “1868.” In Arthur M. Schlesinger, Fred L. Israel, and David J. Frent, eds. Running for President: The Candidates and Their Images. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994.