The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896 (Oxford History of the United States)

by Richard White

For the next week, Hayes continued to think that he had been beaten, but his operatives remained at work. They recognized that the election would come down to the disputed votes in the Southern states still under Republican rule: South Carolina, Louisiana, and Florida. They were determined to win these states where the votes had been cast but not yet approved by the “returning boards” in charge of validating the election results. In the contest for the electoral votes of these states, all that slithered through the corruption, failures, and disappointments of American politics during the previous decade rose to the surface. The Democrats had relied on fraud, violence, and coercion to suppress the black vote, and the Republicans marshaled fraud of their own and their control of the returning boards to count out the Democrats.