Hayes's ride: in 1876, a Democratic candidate won the presidency, but, through a lack of nerve lost the recount. Sound familiar?

Morris's account of the election itself takes up much of the book, but it is a story critical to understanding what happened after the votes were cast. In several Southern states, the clashes went far beyond peaceful politics. Black Republicans, who held power thanks to Reconstruction laws and the presence of federal troops, fought sometimes murderous battles with whites. Charges of intimidation and violence were exchanged across lines of race and party. These charges set the stage for what would happen after the election, when Republican-controlled election boards in Florida, South Carolina, and Louisiana essentially took the most serious GOP charges at face value and threw out enough Democratic votes to swing the states to Hayes--some 13,000 of them in Louisiana, where the officials in charge of the vote count had themselves committed enough crimes to fill a season's worth of "America's Most Wanted."

The scene then shifted to Washington, and a divided Congress--the House was held by Democrats, the Senate by Republicans. Tilden's hope was that the votes of the three Southern states would simply be set aside, throwing the election into the House. Instead--to his dismay--Congress slapped together a 15-man Electoral Commission, with five House members, five Senate members, and five Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court--two Democrats, two Republicans, and one independent. But, in a last-minute twist no screenwriter would dare concoct, David Davis, the independent justice, was elected senator from Illinois, and promptly resigned--to be replaced by a loyal Republican justice who cast every vote along party lines. The Electoral Commission gave every contested electoral vote to Hayes. Tilden, who had resisted his followers' urgings to dispatch supporters to Washington, or to contest the process in the streets--"Tilden or Blood!" went the cry--chose not to plunge the country into chaos.

"We have just emerged from one Civil War," he said. "It will never do to engage in another; it would end in the destruction of free government."

In fact, the cost of Hayes's victory was dear. While Morris notes that the country had wearied of Reconstruction before the election, Hayes's triumph--due in some part to the willingness of Southern Democrats to accept it in return for a lighter federal hand--led "to the infamous Jim Crow laws that officially sanctioned the social, and political disenfranchisement of millions of Southern blacks: Whether a reform-minded Tilden, taking office without the cloud of fraud that hung over Hayes, could or would have changed this bleak history is one of those tantalizing "what-ifs." As for Hayes--dubbed "His Fraudulency" by his opponents-he had already pledged not to seek a second term before the votes were counted, although his administration was successful enough that one Democratic partisan quipped, "he has done so well that I sometimes almost wish he had been elected."