Forty-three men with forty-three passions, but with one thing in common: a presidential place in America's history. With her gift for unforgettable rhythm and innovative rhyme, Marilyn Singer brings the presidents of the United States to life-from Washington to Obama-and contextualizes them in their time. Illustrations by John Hendrix are full of hilarious wit and refined exuberance, and backmatter enriches the experience with short biographies, quotes by each president, and more.

In this major work of popular history and scholarship, acclaimed historian and biographer Roy Morris, Jr, tells the extraordinary story of how, in America’s centennial year, the presidency was stolen, the Civil War was almost reignited, and Black Americans were consigned to nearly ninety years of legalized segregation in the South. The bitter 1876 contest between Ohio Republican governor Rutherford B. Hayes and New York Democratic governor Samuel J. Tilden is the most sensational, ethically sordid, and legally questionable presidential election in American history. The first since Lincoln’s in 1860 in which the Democrats had a real chance of recapturing the White House, the election was in some ways the last battle of the Civil War, as the two parties fought to preserve or overturn what had been decided by armies just eleven years earlier. Riding a wave of popular revulsion at the numerous scandals of the Grant administration and a sluggish economy, Tilden received some 260,000 more votes than his opponent. But contested returns in Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina ultimately led to Hayes’s being declared the winner by a specially created, Republican-dominated Electoral Commission after four tense months of political intrigue and threats of violence. President Grant took the threats seriously: he ordered armed federal troops into the streets of Washington to keep the peace. Morris brings to life all the colorful personalities and high drama of this most remarkable—and largely forgotten—election. He presents vivid portraits of the bachelor lawyer Tilden, a wealthy New York sophisticate whose passion for clean government propelled him to the very brink of the presidency, and of Hayes, a family man whose Midwestern simplicity masked a cunning political mind. We travel to Philadelphia, where the Centennial Exhibition celebrated America’s industrial might and democratic ideals, and to the nation’s heartland, where Republicans waged a cynical but effective “bloody shirt” campaign to tar the Democrats, once again, as the party of disunion and rebellion. Morris dramatically recreates the suspenseful events of election night, when both candidates went to bed believing Tilden had won, and a one-legged former Union army general, “Devil Dan” Sickles, stumped into Republican headquarters and hastily improvised a devious plan to subvert the election in the three disputed southern states. We watch Hayes outmaneuver the curiously passive Tilden and his supporters in the days following the election, and witness the late-night backroom maneuvering of party leaders in the nation's capital, where democracy itself was ultimately subverted and the will of the people thwarted. Fraud of the Century presents compelling evidence that fraud by Republican vote-counters in the three southern states, and especially in Louisiana, robbed Tilden of the presidency. It is at once a masterful example of political reporting and an absorbing read.

He has also been criticized for championing the gold standard, for breaking the Great Strike of 1877, for inconsistent support of civil-service reform, and for being an ineffectual politician. Hoogenboom contends that these evaluations are largely false. Previous scholars, he says, have failed to appreciate Hayes's limited options and have misrepresented his actions in their depictions of an overly cautious, nonvisionary president. In fact, he was strikingly modern in his efforts to enlarge the power of the office, which he used as his own bully pulpit to rouse public support for his goals. Chief among these goals, Hoogenboom shows, was equality for all Americans. Throughout his presidency and long afterwards, Hayes worked steadfastly for reforms that would encourage economic opportunity, distribute wealth more equitably, diminish the conflict between capital and labor, and ultimately enable African-Americans to achieve political equality.

It had never occurred to Rutherford B. Hayes that he could be a presidential contender until he won an unprecedented third term as Ohios governor in 1875. Up to that point, he had been content with his life, but once he got the presidential bug it could not be shaken. At the 1876 Republican National convention, Maines Senator James G. Blaine appeared to have the presidential nomination within his grasp until there was a stampede for Hayes on the seventh ballot. As a Civil War hero, congressman, governor, and solid family man, Hayes was an attractive candidate. As a reformer, he had no ties to the scandals that had marred the Johnson and Grant Administrations. After a hotly contested campaign, Hayes lost the popular vote to New York Governor Samuel Tilden by a quarter million votes. The electoral count was unclear as both parties claimed to have won three Southern states. It took three months and the creation of an Electoral Commission to declare Hayes the presidential winner, just two days before his inauguration. For four years, President Hayes battled a hostile Congress controlled by Democrats as he attempted to reform the civil service, defending the independence of the presidency in an attempt to end sectionalism. His most controversial decision was to try a course of conciliation toward the South in an attempt to heal the rift from the Civil War. Many historians have said that Hayes ended Reconstruction, but in reality it was over before Hayes took office. When he was nominated to run for President, Hayes promised to serve only one term and did not renege on that promise. He returned to Ohio to live out his life with his family and to work for his community, veterans, education, prison reform, and equal rights.

For years, scholars have dismissed Rutherford B. Hayes as an ineffective president. This work demolishes such conventional wisdom by showing that not only was Hayes’ presidency effective, but it was also groundbreaking in its restoration of presidential prerogatives. When Hayes took office in 1877, Congress was taking an ever more decisive role in leading the nation. Hayes was up against a Democratic-controlled legislature and antagonized Republican Party bosses. This work shows how Hayes overcame these forces to advance his agenda. He resisted the hostile congressional effort to keep federal troops in the South; reinstated the gold standard; instituted civil service reform; and ignored the clamor from congressmen beholden to railway magnates to involve the military in the Great Strike of 1877. Hayes’ triumph over these obstacles laid the foundation for the strong executive branch we know today. Presidential Prestige will garner an eager audience of students, scholars, and members of the general public with an interest in American history. By focusing on primary sources such as personal letters, congressional records, and news media, this book adds a new dimension to the overall historiography of the late nineteenth century American political landscape.

Trefousse points out, it was this decision that helped unify the country and restore legitimacy to the Oval Office.".

In the annals of presidential elections, the hotly contested 1876 race between Rutherford B. Hayes and Samuel J. Tilden was in many ways as remarkable in its time as Bush versus Gore was in ours. Chief Justice William Rehnquist offers readers a colorful and peerlessly researched chronicle of the post—Civil War years, when the presidency of Ulysses S. Grant was marked by misjudgment and scandal, and Hayes, Republican governor of Ohio, vied with Tilden, a wealthy Democratic lawyer and successful corruption buster, to succeed Grant as America’s chief executive. The upshot was a very close popular vote (in favor of Tilden) that an irremediably deadlocked Congress was unable to resolve. In the pitched battle that ensued along party lines, the ultimate decision of who would be President rested with a commission that included five Supreme Court justices, as well as five congressional members from each party. With a firm understanding of the energies that motivated the era’s movers and shakers, and no shortage of insight into the processes by which epochal decisions are made, Chief Justice Rehnquist draws the reader intimately into a nineteenth-century event that offers valuable history lessons for us in the twenty-first.

This is an account of the Civil War service of President William McKinley, the last of the Civil War veterans to reach the White House and the only one who served in the ranks. It draws on a range of material to present a picture of McKinley as a soldier and his later life as a veteran in politics.

A Pulitzer Prize-winning historian recounts the tale of the unwanted president who ran afoul of Congress over Reconstruction and was nearly removed from office Andrew Johnson never expected to be president. But just six weeks after becoming Abraham Lincoln's vice president, the events at Ford's Theatre thrust him into the nation's highest office. Johnson faced a nearly impossible task—to succeed America's greatest chief executive, to bind the nation's wounds after the Civil War, and to work with a Congress controlled by the so-called Radical Republicans. Annette Gordon-Reed, one of America's leading historians of slavery, shows how ill-suited Johnson was for this daunting task. His vision of reconciliation abandoned the millions of former slaves (for whom he felt undisguised contempt) and antagonized congressional leaders, who tried to limit his powers and eventually impeached him. The climax of Johnson's presidency was his trial in the Senate and his acquittal by a single vote, which Gordon-Reed recounts with drama and palpable tension. Despite his victory, Johnson's term in office was a crucial missed opportunity; he failed the country at a pivotal moment, leaving America with problems that we are still trying to solve.