The Election of 1876:

Let’s return again to those thrilling days of yesteryear when the Lone Ranger and Superman stood for truth, justice and the American Way but were asleep at the switch. The time was the election of 1876 between Republican Rutherford B. Hayes and Democrat Samuel Tilden which ended with Tilden having more electoral votes then Hayes. The Hayes people made a deal with 3 Southern states that in return for changing their votes, Hays would pull federal troops out of the old Confederacy leaving whites to reimpose the old plantation society where black people were relegated back to the cotton fields with no citizenship rights. For close to a hundred years, violence with night riding Ku Klux Klansmen kept this structure of society intact in the South. Henry Adams, who was the most preeminent columnist and social commentator of the time, lived in a house in Washington D.C. just down the street from the White House, was so incensed by what Hayes had done he later offered this comment about Hayes, “I ignored him and one day he simply went away”.