> Skip to content
Centennial Crisis
William H. Rehnquist
  • Published: 18 December 2007
  • ISBN: 9780307425218
  • Imprint: RH US eBook Adult
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 288
Categories:

Centennial Crisis

The Disputed Election of 1876




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.

  • Published: 18 December 2007
  • ISBN: 9780307425218
  • Imprint: RH US eBook Adult
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 288
Categories:

About the author

William H. Rehnquist

William Rehnquist was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in
1924. He served in the Army Air Corps during WWII,
following which he earned his B.A. (Phi Beta Kappa) and
M.A. in political science at Stanford University in 1948.
He received a second M.A. in government from Harvard
two years later. He then entered Stanford Law School
where he graduated first in his class in 1952. Rehnquist
was described by one of his instructors as "the outstanding
student of his law school generation."
He married Natalie Cornell in 1953, and went to work for a
law firm in Phoenix, Arizona. The couple had a son and
two daughters. In 1964 Rehnquist became assistant
Attorney General for the Justice Department's Office of
Legal Council. He was confirmed by the Senate as an
Associate Justice of the Supreme Court in December, 1971,
and took his place on the bench in January, 1972. He
became the sixteenth Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in
1987.

Also by William H. Rehnquist

See all
penguin pop image
penguin pop image