Read up a bit on the election of 1876. Tilden almost certainly got cheated in that one. Yes, there was certainly voter intimidation going on in the disputed southern states, but the actual count of legally cast ballots almost certainly favored Tilden over Hayes.
The key thing about the election of 1876 (similar to 2020) was the phony “turnout” numbers.
In those days both parties knew how to get the dead people to the polls!
I’m not blaming Hayes ended reconstruction good for him
But you are correct
A seriously stinky election
Tilden and the Democrats agreed to accept “losing” the 1876 election in exchange for Reconstruction coming to an end.
Tilden certainly won the 1876 election. Tilden had both the popular and electoral college, at least until Republicans refused to seat some of Tilden’s electors. They were able to do that because during Reconstruction the South was essentially an occupied country under Republican military rule, a preview of the Red Army and the captive nations.
Reconstruction was a project of the Radical Republicans and they did a number of things that the later Bolsheviks would emulate. It’s not a coincidence that for a dozen years Marx wrote for the NY Tribune, the defacto GOP party newspaper. It amuses me how the only ones who seem to know that the Republicans have some communist roots are Marxist writers. I always wonder what the rah rah crowd thinks if they stumble across this odd history. Probably insist that it’s not true, and then ignore it when confronted with the evidence that it is.