Today's American history lesson...............

      For the nation was then [1876], as it so often has been, at war with itself; in fact it was engaged in different wars simultaneously, each being waged on several fronts, wars that ran along the fault lines of modern America. . . .

     In the South, a far more important but equally savage war was being waged as white Democrats sought "redemption" from Reconstruction in anticipation of the presidential election.  Throughout the South "rifle clubs," "saber clubs," and "rifle teams" of former Confederates were being organized into infantry and cavalry units.  Already accounts of intimidation, beatings, whippings, and murder directed against Republicans and blacks had surfaced.  After the murder of three hundred black men in a single Mississippi county, one man, convinced that the words from the Democrat's own mouths would convince the world of their design, pleaded with the New York Times, "for God's sake publish the testimony of the Democrats before the Grand Jury."

      Voting returns had already begun to come in—there was no single national election day—and two months later Democrat Samuel Tilden would win the popular vote by a comfortable margin.  But he would never take office as president.  Instead the Republican secretary of war would threaten to "force a reversal" of the vote, federal troops with fixed bayonets would patrol Washington, and southerners would talk of reigniting the Civil War.  That crisis would ultimately be resolved through an extra-constitutional special committee and a political understanding:  Republicans would discard the voting returns of three states—Louisiana, Florida, South Carolina—and seize a single disputed electoral vote in Oregon to keep the presidency in the person of Rutherford B. Hayes.  But they also would withdraw all federal troops from the South and cease intervening in southern affairs, leaving the Negroes there to fend for themselves.

-John M. Barry, The Great Influenza