1868 U.S. presidential election

In 1868 Republican Ulysses S. Grant, the general who had won the Civil War, defeated Democrat Horatio Seymour, a former governor of New York, by 214 electoral votes to 80, and by about 52.7 percent of the popular vote to 47.3. Three Southern states not yet restored to Congress, Virginia, Mississippi and Texas, did not vote. It was the first presidential election in which large numbers of Black men voted, in Southern states remade under Reconstruction.¹²³

The election followed a bitter fight over how to rebuild the South. President Andrew Johnson, who took office after Lincoln's assassination, clashed with Republicans in Congress, who passed the 14th Amendment and the Reconstruction Acts over his objections and impeached him in 1868; the Senate acquitted him by one vote. Republicans ran Grant with the slogan 'Let us have peace.' Democrats campaigned openly against Black equality, and the Ku Klux Klan used terror to suppress Black voters in parts of the South, especially Louisiana and Georgia. Grant's popular margin, about 305,000 votes, was smaller than the estimated Black vote for him, as historians often note, which pushed Republicans to protect Black voting nationwide through the 15th Amendment, sent to the states in 1869.¹²