Hi in the Middle and Round at Both Ends

As Ohio goes so goes the nation. It was true on November 6th this year and even more so in 1876. We think that our latest presidential election was acrimonious. Hardly in comparison to the Centennial race. The country was in the midst of post-Civil War Reconstruction. Custer and his blue coated troopers had been massacred at the Little Big Horn River and Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, from Ohio of course

, and Democrat Samuel Tilden were neck in neck in the race. When the votes were tallied Tilden had won both the popular vote and, what mattered most, the Electoral College. But, not surprisingly, the results were contested. A few of the electors were found to be ineligible as they held political office. After weeks of legal wrangling, the last remaining uncommitted electors were awarded to Hayes and that pushed him ahead of Tilden. Hayes, a Civil War hero who had been wounded five times, became our 19th president and took the country out of Reconstruction and into the modern era.