By One Vote: The Disputed Presidential Election of 1876. By Michael F. Holt. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008. xiv, 300 pp. $34.95, ISBN 978-0-7006-1608-4.)

Abstract

Michael F. Holt's By One Vote is the most comprehensive account to date of the presidential election that effectively ended Reconstruction and in some ways foreshadowed another disputed contest a century and a quarter later. It is one of several new additions to the American Presidential Elections series from the University Press of Kansas. Like other volumes in that series, it draws primarily on printed sources; it is also supplemented by the papers of Rutherford B. Hayes, Samuel J. Tilden, and Manton Marble. Holt brings to his work a keen eye for telling details without straying from his main focus on larger patterns, making his book a valuable addition to the literature on Gilded Age politics. Holt's most original contribution appears in his early chapters and in several succinct statistical appendices, where he describes and accounts for the Grand Old Party's big victory in the presidential and congressional elections of 1872, its near collapse in the congressional contests two years later, and then its substantial recovery in 1875 and 1876. The magnitude of the Republican landslide in 1872 was enhanced by the large number of Democrats who stayed home rather than vote for Horace Greeley—who had never been a Democrat and, in fact, had spent most of his journalistic career excoriating Democrats in language both imaginative and unrestrained. Those Democrats returned to their normal voting habits in 1874, joined by a smaller number of Liberal Republicans who thus permanently abandoned the gop. At the same time, a large number of Republicans in the middle Atlantic and midwestern states, angry at the scandal-ridden Ulysses S. Grant administration and alarmed by the sharp rise in unemployment after the Panic of 1873 but unwilling to cross party lines so soon after the Civil War, boycotted the polls. Over the next two years, Republican leaders worked hard to lure their disaffected followers back to the fold, pledging reform, exploiting lingering wartime passions, and raising the specter of a Catholic-dominated Democratic party that would share public school funds with parochial schools. By the start of the 1876 presidential campaign it was apparent to leaders on both sides that the two major parties were about at parity.