1868 United States presidential election information
21st quadrennial U.S. presidential election
1868 United States presidential election
← 1864
November 3, 1868
1872 →
294 members of the Electoral College 148 electoral votes needed to win
Turnout
80.9% [1] 4.6 pp
Nominee
Ulysses S. Grant
Horatio Seymour
Party
Republican
Democratic
Home state
Illinois
New York
Running mate
Schuyler Colfax
Francis Preston Blair Jr.
Electoral vote
214
80
States carried
26
8
Popular vote
3,013,421
2,706,829
Percentage
52.7%
47.3%
Presidential election results map. Red denotes states won by Grant/Colfax, blue denotes those won by Seymour/Blair, and green denotes those states that had not yet been restored to the Union and which were therefore ineligible to vote. Numbers indicate the number of electoral votes allotted to each state.
President before election
Andrew Johnson
National Union
Elected President
Ulysses S. Grant
Republican
The 1868 United States presidential election was the 21st quadrennial presidential election, held on Tuesday, November 3, 1868. In the first election of the Reconstruction Era, Republican nominee Ulysses S. Grant defeated Horatio Seymour of the Democratic Party. It was the first presidential election to take place after the conclusion of the American Civil War and the abolition of slavery. It was the first election in which African Americans could vote in the reconstructed Southern states, in accordance with the First Reconstruction Act.
Incumbent president Andrew Johnson had succeeded to the presidency in 1865 following the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, a Republican. Johnson, a War Democrat from Tennessee, had served as Lincoln's running mate in 1864 on the National Union ticket, which was designed to attract Republicans and War Democrats. Upon accession to office, Johnson clashed with the Republican Congress over Reconstruction policies and was impeached and nearly removed from office. Johnson received some support for another term at the 1868 Democratic National Convention, but, after several ballots, the convention nominated Seymour, who had formerly served as Governor of New York. The 1868 Republican National Convention unanimously nominated Grant, who had been the highest-ranking Union general at the end of the Civil War. The Democrats criticized the Republican Reconstruction policies, and "campaigned explicitly on an anti-black, pro-white platform,"[2] while Republicans campaigned on Grant's popularity and the Union victory in the Civil War.
Grant decisively won the electoral vote, but his margin was narrower in the popular vote. In addition to his appeal in the North, Grant benefited from votes among the newly enfranchised freedmen in the South, while the temporary political disfranchisement of many Southern whites helped Republican margins. As three of the former Confederate states (Texas, Mississippi, and Virginia) were not yet restored to the Union, their electors could not vote in the election. This was the last time that Missouri supported the Republican candidate until 1904. This was also the last time until 1912 that the Democrats carried more electoral votes from the North (46) than from the South (34), though this was partly due to extremely exceptional circumstances involving the Reconstruction, and in 1912 the reversal occurred due to the better Democratic performance nationwide as well as the higher population of the North. This was also the last time the Republicans did better in the popular vote in the South than in the North until 1964, again due to very large majorities in reconstruction states like South Carolina and Tennessee.
^"National General Election VEP Turnout Rates, 1789–Present". United States Election Project. CQ Press.
^Tali Mendelberg (2001), The Race Card: Campaign Strategy, Implicit Messages, and the Norm of Equality, Princeton University Press, pg. 45–46
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4.6 pp
