# 1868 Presidential Election The first post-Civil-War presidential election. [[Ulysses S. Grant]] — Union commanding general, hero of Vicksburg and Appomattox — defeated Democrat Horatio Seymour, former Governor of New York, 214 to 80 electoral votes. Three former Confederate states (Mississippi, Texas, Virginia) had not yet been readmitted to the Union and did not vote. Grant won the popular vote by 52.7% to 47.3% — a 305,000 vote margin in a national electorate now expanded by the [[15th Amendment]]'s protection of Black male suffrage (ratified 1870 but Black male suffrage was already operating in much of the South under Congressional Reconstruction in 1868). The Black vote was decisive in several Southern states. ## Result - **[[Ulysses S. Grant]]** (Republican) — 214 electoral votes, 52.7% popular - **Horatio Seymour** (Democrat) — 80 electoral votes, 47.3% popular - Total: 294 electoral votes (3 Confederate states absent) ## Right-wing relevance The 1868 election is significant for right-wing analysis as the **operational debut of the Black male electorate** as a decisive factor in American national elections — and as the moment the Democratic Party adopted its post-war identity as the white-supremacist opposition to Black political participation. The Seymour campaign ran on explicitly racist rhetoric and the Ku Klux Klan operated as effective Democratic Party paramilitary in the South during the campaign. The post-Reconstruction Democratic Party's century-long position as the party of Southern white supremacy traces its operational origin to this election; the eventual [[Civil Rights Act]] / Voting Rights Act realignment of the 1960s reversed the polarity but the partisan structure persisted. ## Connections - [[Ulysses S. Grant]] — Winner; would aggressively enforce Reconstruction. - [[Andrew Johnson]] — Outgoing president; impeached earlier in 1868; not renominated. ---